The Storm at the Heart of the Sun
by DorianGray91
Summary: Bad boys and Stockholm Syndrome! The Doctor lost his memory and became a monster. Sarah is trying to bring back the Good Man again whilst withholding his identity from him - but something else is about to step onto the scene, something that will recall his dark history in a big, bad way. The Earth will soon be in danger from the one man who's always protected it.
1. Neurons and Synapse Splices

Author's Notes.

For those of you who haven't read _The Host _by Stephanie Meyer.

A "Soul" is an alien parasite, like a kind of silver ribbon, inserted into the back of a host's neck and connected to its brain. It takes over the host's mind, living in its body. You can tell a Soul is living inside a host by the luminous silver ring that appears around the pupils of the eyes.

* * *

I don't own the Doctor or the Souls, but I do own my character Sarah.  
There is something very special about her, as there should be with all companions. But that's a big secret.  
Meanwhile, for those a little infatuated with the Doctor, here's your chance to see him in all his captivatingly evil, predatory glory. It's going to be tasty.

* * *

**The Karkaras:** These aliens have no legs but six arms in total, four of which are used for transportation. They are far from predatory, favouring stun guns as a choice of weapon. Their features are long and horse-like, with large burnt-orange eyes and mild expressions. They are just one of many species victim to the Souls.

* * *

**1**

That fatal adventure on the planet Kark, in the galaxy of Pertacore, is recorded as the most sinister and terrifying event in Universal memory.

Nobody was there to save him. Just one unlucky turn around the wrong corner.  
That was all it took for the seeming downfall of the Doctor.

The last thing he saw with his own eyes was the burnt turquoise flare of a Karkaras stun gun.  
The lonely spaceman, defeated at last.

The Karkaras - or rather the Souls inhabiting their bodies - fretted over the unconscious stranger.  
Where had he come from? What was he? Why had _he_ come to _them_, when ordinarily it was the Souls who sought out new planets to explore and master?  
Had he come to conquer them? Didn't he know how impossible his task would have been?

One man against six thousand Karkaras, and trillions of Souls across the Universe.

Putting these absurd ideas aside, they carried his limp form to the laboratory, situated beneath the city, away from prying eyes.  
It was time to find out the solid facts and decide what to do with him based upon the evidence.  
In all likelihood, they would insert a Soul into him and send him on his way - as they did with almost all of their findings. It was just their nature.

The slightly worn tweed jacket, scarlet bow tie and pinstriped shirt hung on a makeshift hook in the operating room. The initial scan and medical assessment had begun.

The leading Soul, Melowe, suddenly recoiled as though electrocuted and dropped the stethoscope he had been holding to the Doctor's chest.

"This isn't any ordinary species." he croaked, eyeing the unconscious man with new approval, "He has two hearts. By the Mother, he has _two hearts_!"  
"What does that mean, Melowe, Sir?" chirped a young Soul impatiently.

"It means - it means we have a Time Lord on our hands."  
"Sir?"  
"This man is the last of his kind. The only Time Lord left in existence that we know of."

Laine, second-in-command, glanced at Melowe warily. Their plan to turn him Host had abruptly become an uncertain one.  
"Is this allowed?"

"It can't be ethical - destroying a species!" the young one spoke again. Melowe silenced him with a wave of his fifth hand.

"This man... he could lead us to success beyond our imaginations. We could use him to bring peace to the Universe... That's what he does, isn't it? This famous Doctor?"

"We'll need our strongest." Laine asserted, "Time Lords are immensely powerful, their minds are miracles. We can't afford to make a mistake."

"Bring out the new Alpha, then." Melowe said, "He can stand it. Perhaps he can even negotiate, salvage some of this_ Doctor's_ memories and intelligence."

The Souls took care not to underestimate the Doctor.  
But that didn't stop him from being the most underestimated creature in the known Universe.

And it certainly did not stop them from making the biggest mistake in Intergalactic history.

* * *

Under the heaviest anaesthetic the Souls had, the Doctor didn't stir as they slit him open at the base of his skull and carefully lowered the Alpha Soul into him.

He twitched a little as the creature attached itself to his brain and settled in for its journey.  
He lay still as they patched up the wound with their quick-working salves and left him to rest, ushering the younger trainees out.

But then, something began to happen.

The Doctor's fingers twitched. His arms spasmed.

And then, quite abruptly, his entire body curled up like a hedgehog's, bristling and throbbing.  
"By the Mother!" Melowe cried, as the man upon the slab began to writhe and fit and frenzy like a possessed thing.

"He's reacting to it." Laine breathed, "I can't believe it. He's rebelling against the Alpha."

The Doctor's eyes were closed but his brain was a hurricane, fighting back with unconscious strength, and the Soul inside was battling to keep a hold.

The squad rushed to his side, trying to hold him down, but his seizure was so violent that anyone who touched him was thrown backwards, off all six hands and onto their backs.

"THE EQUIPMENT! WE NEED TO GET THE ALPHA OUT OF THERE!" Laine yelled.  
Souls scrambled to find scalpels and healing salve, but it was too late.

He was screeching incoherently, and the Souls could feel an awful clash raging like a storm between Alpha and Time Lord.

"What's happening to it?"  
"What's happening to both of them?"

The Doctor's eyelids snapped open as he screamed deafeningly. His hands grasped at his head, tearing his own hair, trying to remove the creature inside.  
No good. The fusion was starting to happen, like the melding of incompatible metals.

The two species tore, battered one another... and then unbelievably, irrefutably bonded, in an awful electrical explosion of neurons and synapse splices.

Melowe gasped as he sensed the hellish combination of Gallifreyan and Soul, like a conscious operation, like needles thrust into every part of the body.

The wild eyes looked like gaping holes in the fabric of Time itself - he choked and stuttered as the hybrid abomination took place - anger flared up like the Devil in his expression. He was the most horrifying sight they had ever beheld.

Then, he emitted one small sigh - froze - caved in on himself, and slumped down across the slab.

"Alright!" Melowe called straight away, dusting himself off and reaching for the equipment, "We need to clear this up. Removal of the Alpha. If we can't save the Time Lord it'll have to be necessary extermination."

"But, Sir... the last Time Lord -"  
"I know!" Melowe snapped at the trainee, "Don't you think I know? We're going to be in the biggest Intergalactic trouble since the Falkin incident in the Rasmus nebula! But we can't have this."

He turned the Doctor over onto his stomach, and bent the scalpel towards the back of his neck.

It never reached his skin.

Instead, a furnace-hot hand shot out and grabbed the scalpel by the handle.  
It was twisted out of Melowe's fingers, and in a moment that was frozen with shock and adrenaline, went plunging into his torso.

Vital organs burst with a sickening, wet pop. Clear thick liquid dribbled down onto the floor.

The Time Lord sat rigid on the edge of the operating table, eyes levelled darkly at the Karkaras he had just attacked. His arm was firm and unshaken as it swiftly slashed downwards, dragging the knife through his victim's body in one fell swoop, the hand of retribution.

The Souls stood motionless, appalled, solidified with fear.  
Melowe looked down at his open belly. At the disgusting-coloured shapes that slid about, freed from their cage of skin and bone.

He lifted his face slowly, his breathing the only sound in the room, and stared straight into the eyes of the feral, unblinking monster he had created.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," he whimpered.

The Karkaras body slid to the ground, soaking his clothes in the puddle that had formed there, and lay still.

The Doctor - or simply the Time Lord, as we now must refer to him - cocked his head to gaze menacingly at the rest of the Souls.  
They fled. But he did not let them go.

Bent on bloodshed, he pursued closely with his crude weapon.

* * *

Two managed to escape to the upper floor, where warning bells went off, and the entire city went into emergency lock down.

Everybody else perished under the knife. Under his chill, unforgiving leer. Under his storming footsteps and the awful power of his will.

Then the Time Lord - what was left of him - fled swiftly to the only place that he recognised in the tattered remains of his mind as Safety.  
The blue box opened reluctantly to him.

As he collapsed upon its leather cream chair and screamed and screamed for sheer torture of confusion and rage, the heart of the TARDIS waxed cold and timid.

It knew. And it was more afraid than it had felt in its entire existence.

The Universe was in the deadliest peril it had seen since the dawn of Time.

The Master, the Daleks, were nothing in light of this.  
There had always been a hero, indomitable and everlasting, to prevent them.

... Who would prevent him?


	2. From the Black Pit

If you read, pretty please review, even if it's just to say you've read it. The quality and frequency of my updates depends on encouragement.

* * *

**2**

The Time Lord slouched unconscious against the cream seat, where he had dropped in his fit of panic.

His cheek rested against the cool material, expression blank and peaceful.  
Anyone would have thought him the real Doctor, seeing him like this - unless they had caught sight of the vertical scar on the back of his neck, half-hidden in his hair.

His eyelids twitched, and slowly blinked open.

The slack muscles of his hybrid body became taut and quivered as he rose to consciousness; his body felt like a live bomb, ready to go off at any uncertain point.

Something crinkled and made noise around his body.  
He looked down - he was wearing a white sheet with loose sleeves. Clinical. Papery.  
He tore it off, feeling it did not belong to him.

The trousers and shoes he left on - they were familiar. They fitted, at least.

He had spent an eternity screaming. His throat was parched and sore, his lungs strained.  
Now, instead, he slowly pulled himself up onto the chair and slumped with his head between his knees, fighting off nausea.

He had been screaming because... because he didn't know what was going on.  
He only knew that he felt insane.

And that he had no idea why. No notion of how he had ended up here, what he was.  
Why there were words in his head, meanings to everything he looked at.  
It was like remembering things from a dream long ago.

Everything was so... bewildering.

He had known to run to this blue box. How? What _was_ it?  
He had never seen it in his life, but he had seen it in his own mind, known where it would be, waiting for him.

The monsters - there were things, hideous _things_ - that had tried to kill him, and that he had hunted down, in a haze of vengeance and fear.

Why did they want him? And what had they been doing to him?  
Were they the cause of all this?

Where was he?  
More importantly, where was he _meant_ to be?

Huge chunks of information were just missing. Had he been unconscious when they kidnapped him? How long for?  
And if so, where had they brought him from? _Why _him? What was significant about him? What did they need?

Why had they been cruel? How had they even managed to catch him, when they'd run like rodents from him afterwards?  
Where had he been heading? Was he there for a purpose? Had he achieved it?  
Had it been to kill them?

That last thought sat inside him with a satisfactory weight.

An image of silver, squirming things encased in thick glass shot through his mind.  
He didn't even know what it meant, or if it belonged to him.

There was a feeling, a raging, instinctual, awful feeling somewhere in his gut.  
It told him that it wanted something. _He _wanted something.

_I'm sorry. I'm so sorry._  
The enemy's face... contorted in agony as it breathed its last.  
Wet drips of fluid and the softness of internal things against his fingers as the tool sliced through.

The fierce - triumph - of the kill.  
The thrill of the chase tearing his veins with electricity, pain in his pumping lungs, desperate squeals as he caught small hands and stepped on cracking ribs.

His belly pulled at him again with more violence, more fire.

_Some escaped.  
_And that wasn't good enough.

* * *

He stood looking up at the single exit of the laboratory: a round shape in the ceiling, with a gravity platform for a door.  
He didn't know how he knew it was a gravity platform.

How could he know the function of something he had never seen?  
_Why_ was he so clever and so _stupid_? The thought enraged him more than ever.

There was a panel in the floor. Decorated with assorted symbols. The right sequence was required.  
Only, he didn't need a sequence.

His hand moved automatically, reaching for the inner pocket of a jacket he wasn't wearing, and instead touching his bare skin.

He swore under his breath and set about the lab to look for the tweed coat. There it was, hanging up with other very familiar-looking garments.

He retrieved a Sonic Screwdriver from it without putting the clothes back on, and ran to assume his place at the exit.  
His anger that he knew the name 'Sonic Screwdriver', but not where it came from or why he owned one, was overriden by the pleasure of success.

One quick zap with his new tool, and the platform dropped from the ceiling, waiting at his feet.

He took a single, shaking step, and it accepted his bodyweight without effort.

His upturned, murderous expression was illuminated by the rays of light from the city above him.  
He rose like Satan himself, from the black pit, into heaven's brightness.

He blinked in the new, blinding room, trying to get his bearings.  
He was inside a small clinical-looking space, lined with screens, switches, levers, buttons, touchboards, coders...

Jackpot.

* * *

His fingers moved at lightning rate across the sleek panels of controls.

His brain was working heavily too - calculating, connecting the various buttons to various meanings, gradually overriding the city's system.  
He didn't really have a plan. He just did what he felt like doing.

First, open all the doors. Every door in that heavily blockaded fortress. Really shake them up.

He thought of the faces, the dumb confusion, the panicked rush for cover that didn't exist any more. Let them know exactly what he could do. Then advance.

The hairs stiffened on the back of his neck just minutes after he had begun his sabotage.  
Somebody had joined him in the room.

He turned around, and to his mild surprise saw that he was severely mistaken.

Not somebody, but somebodies. Several. About a hundred, in fact.  
They stood at the main entrance - behind them he could see the passage leading up to the city.

They all had guns, and they were all pointing them at him.

Walking on four hands really did have its advantages. It was only their lack of noisy shoes that had allowed them to sneak up on him.

He suddenly realised that he didn't have a weapon, and wondered why.  
It was probably stowed in that blue box, somewhere. Should have thought to bring it along.

But he didn't feel afraid. Very much to the contrary.  
He felt an awful lot better than he had been on his own, in that infernal silence. Now... he felt _good_. In control.

"Ah. Hello." he smirked a very intimidating smirk.  
"Step away from the security panels."  
"I don't think I want to."  
"These aren't stun guns any more, Doctor. These are built for bigger things. Be warned."

He staggered back a pace, glaring at the Soul who had spoken.  
Again with the name-knowing. It was worse than not recognising anything at all. Somehow, he knew that was _his _name. How did_ they_ know it?

"What did you call me?" he choked.

"You have to listen. We've made a mistake -"  
"Yes, you really have."  
"Now you need to come with us and talk this over -"  
"TALK!" he roared, so suddenly that it was their turn to jump backwards, "I don't _talk_! I _act_. And that's all any of you need to know, so go on, shoot me."

"What?"  
"Shoot me! _Shoot me dead_! I don't know what's happening to me and I don't want to!" he spat, spreading his arms out in defiance.  
"Doctor, we can help..."

"STOP calling me that!"  
"We can help you."  
"Were you helping me when you _did this_ _to me_?"

His fists were balled up with utter fury. All hell blazed in his grey-green orbs.

At least, they _should_ have been grey-green.

The Souls did a double take, because they abruptly realised that the Time Lord they had been dealing with looked more disturbing and harrowing than any of them could have guessed before now. Their own burnt orange eyes, ringed silver around the pupils - the only visible sign of the Souls' presence - widened in dismay.

His irises weren't silver-ringed like theirs at all. They were silver-_blotched_.  
Luminous smudges interrupted the ordinary green hues, as though the Alpha Soul was... _bleeding_ through. As though it were injured, maimed, cursed.

"By the Mother." the military leader stuttered.

The Time Lord huffed, and with a speed they couldn't match, pressed a single square button near the top of the panel.  
The Souls quickly resumed their offensive positions, lifting their guns and aiming.

"Don't touch." their leader warned.  
"I told you to shoot me." he answered in a wry tone, "I'm afraid you missed your chance."

The city above their heads rumbled and quaked with massive impact. The Souls fell to the floor while the Time Lord held onto the controls to keep himself steady.

The explosions were getting closer, so many of them. They could sense them sweeping through the entire area.  
They could sense the deaths, like a wave, rolling dozens upon dozens at a time.

The fuses of the controls began to fizz and spit sparks. The Doctor backed slowly away from the bewildered, fearful soldiers.  
His face was shadowed, smouldering with dark temper, and worst of all - solemn triumph.

_This _was where he belonged. _This_ was what he was here for.

To watch everybody else burn.

A huge, monstrous explosion just outside the door knocked the Souls flying. Arms flew everywhere, most not attached to bodies any longer. Heads knocked against walls and floor, split and bled. All but one died instantly in that single eruption. The Time Lord stood rigid, breathing heavily.

The single survivor was on her back, gazing weakly up at him as she clutched the piece of debris that was stuck in her torso. Her orange eyes gleamed as her graceful, equine face contorted in agony.

To his horror, she reached out a spare arm towards him, trembling with the effort.  
"Doctor." she whispered, in a strangled voice, "Please... Please, help me."

The next explosion would wipe out the controls room. He didn't have much time.

He glanced down, and grinned at the gravity platform he was standing not feet from.

The Soul's expression was halfway to hopeful, encouraged by his smile, as he met her stare again.  
He paused, and sneered with such malice that she recoiled where she was lying.

Then he dropped through the circular exit to safety, as the room finally went up in fiery light, and crumbled into fragments upon the corpses of the soldiers.


	3. Set Of Coordinates

I can tell this story's going to get a bit steamy later on!

* * *

**3**

The Time Lord leaned against the door frame of his blue box - his TARDIS, he corrected himself - as it hung in non-atmosphere above the planet of Kark.

Explosions were still happening, very far away now, slowly engulfing the glimmering palace in sulphury smoke and fire.  
It was the most awe-inspiring sight he had ever beheld.

Not that he had many sights to go on. There was the laboratory, the controls room, and the inside of his ship.

He _must_ have seen things before that. If this was really his ship - and he presumed it was, since he had known exactly how to make it function and it had taken him here, out of the danger - then he must be a moving thing. A traveller, was that the word?  
He must have seen... _something_.

But what was there to be seen? He had no context to follow. No idea of where he was or where he'd been bound.

So why was it that when he saw certain things - when he was in need - names came seeping back to him? Why did he know how things worked? What was his existence, up until this point?

What was that darkling world he couldn't reach, swathed in mystery, concealed by anti-knowledge?

A dreadful thought shook him.  
Perhaps... there had been no life before this.

He had woken up. And the monsters were there. And he knew names, but nothing else.

Had he been... _grown _there? Was that why they told him he had a name? Because they had named him?  
He imagined them leaning over his empty body, filling it with thoughts and abilities and names, endless names, preparing him for life.

But why give him all these resources? A ship, a screwdriver, a brain so quick and brilliant? Surely it was disadvantageous to them?  
Had they had a purpose for him? Were they going to use him as a weapon?

Because he felt like a weapon. A bomb. A walking bringer of death. An oncoming storm. He was all fire and ice, and he burned with a cold fury. If that had been their plan, then it had backfired on them.

Somehow, he doubted he had come from them. He would have _looked_ more like them. And surely, they couldn't have been so intelligent and yet so stupid as to give him all of this, all of his mind, all of this weaponry at his aid?

That reminded him - weapons. Where was his? There must be one around somewhere. In case any more strangers turned up to investigate or attack, he should be ready.  
He set off spontaneously, sealing the TARDIS entrance behind him and heading down the main corridor, trying doors as he went.

There was a library. With a swimming pool.  
A costume department.  
A bathroom that was the size of a house, with a tub like a small lake - a swinging punchbag hung from the ceiling, and several television sets sat about, primitive to mediocre in quality.

He found various rooms that vaguely resembled the main control deck - strangely familiar, as though from a bad dream he'd once had.  
Each time he stepped into one, he felt for a second as though another face peered out at him from the gloom. All ten of them appeared sombre, anxious. He didn't like them.

A room devoted to old vinyl collections, though what of, he didn't remember.  
An attic room, as far as a ship with no upper floors could hold an attic, with broken bits and bobs in dusty boxes.  
A music room that adjoined onto a sunny beach, with a waiting glass of punch and a deckchair.  
A room with a single desk, and sheafs and sheafs of blotted paper.  
A golf course.  
A casino room, where a few shady people looked up at him as though they had been waiting for his return rather a long time.

Rooms with beds in, rooms with boats in, rooms with spacesuits and spanish guitars and gigantic wardrobes full of pristine clothing.  
A room with dust-collecting wine bottles stacked neatly in rows.  
But no weapon rooms.

What felt like years later, he stumbled back to the main deck, panting.

What kind of man wouldn't equip himself with weapons? And what kind of man kept vials of dragon blood in a _sauna_?  
He grunted in great annoyance to himself.

Then he glanced contemptuously at the monitor hanging from the central framework.  
It frustrated him deeply that he understood the language, and realised that it was a code of co-ordinates, telling him where he was. The awful thing was knowing that he was _here_... but not in comparison to _where. _Where would he go? Did he _have _to go anywhere?

There seemed to be no other option. Action was a gut instinct, _boredom_ was a gut feeling.  
He had to go and distract himself somewhere else. Somewhere with more civilisations, possessions, creatures to burn.

He gazed down at the controls, and his fingers itched.  
It was funny, this feeling. This feeling of unknown knowledge.

His brain was mapping out the buttons it knew to press, a certain combination, a well-known sequence. A specific set of co-ordinates were floating around in his mind. He didn't know what they meant or where they led to, but it was a nagging urge so strong that he went and tapped the code into the typewriter right away, just to glimpse what it was.

The monitor flickered, soared through a thousand symbols, then settled on one word, in the hieroglyphic language he knew so very intimately. _Earth.  
_... Yes, he knew that name. He could feel a mystic sense of familiarity shifting in his mind, like a word on the tip of his tongue. Images half-formed wanted to spring up, but slipped away from him just as he grasped at them, increasing his anger to formidable levels.

He would go to this _Earth _and see what he could find there... and then, he would decide whether to ravish it before moving on to another place, and another, and another -

How many places were there?

He dashed to the front doors again, and peered out. Billions upon trillions of twinkling, innocent lights looked back at him.  
There were enough places. Enough to keep him entertained, at least for now.

Perhaps he would even explore some of them before he exploded them. Perhaps he would spare some to be his worshippers, to do his bidding, until he tired of them. Male slaves... and female captives.  
He felt a very strange pull at his loins as he contemplated the idea.

The word was vague, _female_, but it came with an association of softness, round parts, aesthetic pleasure, and physical... things.

Yes, once he started to find the destruction of life forms wearing, he would move on to these new and interesting prospects. And if he didn't have weapons, surely they had some he could steal.

Funny, how he felt a hundred percent certain of his victory. Perhaps because he felt naturally superior. No - _knew _he was naturally superior.

He strode to the control deck, jerked the black lever down, ran around to check the taps, and the TARDIS screeched into action.  
It was fighting him all the way and he could feel it.

While it couldn't prevent his intentions, the compass wavered every now and again, as though it were trying to subtly alter his course.  
Let it. Who cared what part of _Earth _he landed on, anyway.

It was still going to bow down to him.


	4. Sarah

**4**

I jumped.

My phone, which had been sitting placidly on my portion of the desk since the beginning of the lecture, suddenly decided to have a party and began vibrating all over the place. I grabbed it before anyone else in the hall could turn around and glare at me.

"Phones off, please." the wizened, wrinkled lecturer called from his end of the theatre, adjusting his too-thick spectacles and waggling his fluffy white eyebrows.

I ducked my head and hit Reject, cutting off the incoming call. Then I checked.  
It was mum. Again.

Groaning quietly to myself, I leaned my head back and closed my eyes in despair. A nudge in my side made me turn my head slightly to glance at my best friend.  
"What does she want this time?" Kat whispered.  
"Who knows. Probably checking I haven't drowned in the kitchen sink yet."

"She needs to accept that it's a likely possibility."  
"Or maybe I just need to learn how to look after myself. And when to turn off taps."  
Kat grinned wryly, remembering the incident all too clearly.  
"You're too easily distracted."  
"It's not my fault that Big Bang Theory is so watchable."

"Girls. Less chat, please." Professor Brook waggled his eyebrows again.  
Coughing embarrassedly, trying to ignore Kat's huge smirk, I bent over my lecture notes.  
"I was saying… The use of space and time in Jane Austen's _Emma _is significant to the wider arc of the narrative..."

* * *

Kat kicked a stone across the path in front of us as we navigated the university square. The rolling grass, interrupted by a spider's web of paved walkways and the shady boughs of several trees, was dotted with reclining students who ate lunch and played on picnic blankets and sat against trunks reading books.

"So are you coming to mine tonight? I've just got a Netflix account so we could find something other than Dirty Dancing to watch."  
"Sounds good. Take-away?"  
"Chinese?"  
"Right." I looked up at the looming facade of the library, and sighed. "I guess I'm going in there now, then."

Kat patted my shoulder comfortingly.  
"It's only a couple of hours. You deserve a rest from revision, anyway. You could not go."  
"No. Oscar Wilde would hate me for neglecting him."  
"Suit yourself."  
I threw an arm around Kat in goodbye, and then reluctantly began to trudge towards the great red brick building.

At first, the breeze that picked up and made my hair dance around my face didn't strike me as odd.  
Then, quite suddenly, it was swirling and building into a powerful gust, and some great abrasive grinding noise was rising and rising, in a sequence that sounded uncannily like rasping breaths. I stopped to turn and look back at Kat in shared confusion.

What happened next not only blew my mind apart, but also cut Kat off from my sight and isolated me in my bewilderment.

A blue box materialised in the middle of the square.  
Out of nowhere. Flickering on and off like a switch until it was suddenly solid, as solid as any real thing. Literally teleported right there, right in front of me.

"KAT!" I screeched, half in crazed excitement, half in terror. If I was going to witness the freak appearance of an outlandish telephone box in the middle of university campus, I was going to be clinging to my fellow Literature devotee. This would be something to obsess about together for years to come.

The day it finally happened.  
The day reality ceased to be a bore, the day our books came to life.

"SARAH! OH MY CHRIST!" came the equally zealous call.

I took off around the side of the blue box, at a safe perimeter, and flung myself into Kat's arms. We weren't the only ones having a panic attack. The entire square full of students had been roused into a curious, pushy, deafening crowd. We fought to keep our place at the front of the ranks. Cries of bewilderment and anger and exhilaration echoed behind our backs.

"What is it?"  
"What the hell just happened?"  
"It's a Police Box!"  
"What's a Police Box?"

Kat dug her elbow into my side so much it hurt.  
"It's opening! It's opening!"  
"What the hell is going to come out of a _teleporting Police Box_?" I breathed.

The door swung as if in slow motion, and suddenly there wasn't a single noise in the square. An awed, uncanny, frozen silence lay over the scene, as though some unquestionable force had extended a hand and covered our mouths, widened our eyes.

And then I saw him.

He stood in the rectangular pillar of light, like a human, like an alien. His slim black jeans, his brogue boots, his dark grey t-shirt and shabby black leather jacket. So modern, so non sci-fi. But then – the thing in his hand, the strange device that could have been a weapon or a toy. And the expression, the awful all-knowing, not-knowing expression on his angular face. That was the most confusing thing.

Kat's fingers were clenches around my arm in part consternation, part delight.  
"Talk to him, Sarah. Ask him what's going on."  
I was the closest to him, and nobody else seemed to be considering a conversation with this strident, silent man.  
But I couldn't move, couldn't even breathe. I had just taken a closer look into his eyes.

Mutely, I leaned towards the possibility of _alien_. Alien and dangerous. His wondering gaze, though open, was intense and greedy; the set of his jaw and the bitter downturn of his mouth were conspicuous warnings. This was an invader to be reckoned with.

Only the 60's Police Box slightly marred the effect – its mystery teetered between ridiculousness and eeriness. Illuminated inside I could see…  
I choked, and almost jumped backwards.  
Inside, inside was something impossible, surely a trick of the eye, a bending of the light. Something that ruled out all possibilities of _human _undeniably.

He seemed to decide that he'd waited long enough for a reaction. His silver-blotched eyes grazed over me once as he licked his lips, and lifted his arms in presentation of himself.  
"Hello, _Earth_."

A pause. And then a faint murmuring of many hushed voices. Analysing. Anticipating. They were waiting for the next bit of entertainment, waiting for the spaceman to perform another trick. A wave of peril swept over me, as he met my stare and acknowledged my singular fear. We were all in immediate and grave danger – this was a creature who intended harm, more storm than body. Nobody appeared to realise it. Had any of them noticed those defected green halos? Had any of them seen the hard-formed hatred glinting there?

"I thought I would grant you one glimpse of me." He took a definitive step forwards, the space between us crackling with charged animosity and terror. "How fortunate you are to look upon the beauty of it, before I eradicate you."

A stunned silence followed, in which everybody wondered whether to take him seriously. Then…  
"He's mad!" somebody expostulated from the back.  
"What's with the box?"  
"Are you lost, mate?"

He raised his eyebrows, and uttered a cold and horrifying laugh.  
"I suppose I am lost. But that doesn't mean anything." He pointed his device at the offending speakers, who stood huddled together, regretting their boldness. "I will enjoy watching your planet crumble. You first."

"NO!"  
I flinched, startled by the shout right next to me. Turning, I saw Kat reaching into her rucksack.

It all happened in a split second, so swiftly I failed to do anything but stand by and watch, as one stands and watches a falling object or an explosion. I was empty and hanging in the air.  
Kat's arm emerged from the bag clutching her Taser, the one she always walked home with from our movie nights. Straightening her aim right at him, she was about to press –

And then his weapon beamed at hers and she was on the floor twitching, she was on the floor screaming, and I couldn't touch her for fear of being electrocuted myself. She shrieked and shrieked and cried. I shouted her name over and over, standing by, and watching. She shrieked, and shrieked, and then stopped.

She lay still. Smoke began to rise softly from her body.

"Kat?" I crouched, still too scared to touch her. "Kat? Kat?"  
I just kept saying her name and she kept not answering.  
Her eyes were still open, jaw stiff with agony.

He was standing there like a force of nature. Putting his device back into a pocket. Cruelly calm.  
I didn't have words for him – only the insane desire to hit him, everywhere that hurt, and to never stop hitting him, not even after he was dead at my feet in his turn. My body sprang and left my mind behind. My hands were balled up, ready for impact, I was flying like death and violence.

And then I was caught. I was caught by the wrist and then by the waist, and I struggled, and couldn't break away, and tight arms and tight hands detained me, using my own momentum against me, and then I was being swung about, swung about and pitched forwards into the impossible inside of that awful blue box, and the door was slammed behind me, and the sound of its locking ended everything in one swift noise of finality.

I lay with my head to the floor, not daring to look up at the incomprehensible bigness of it.  
A space ship.

Outside, screams began to rise like horrible sirens. Peoples' feet clattered. Shouts mingled.  
And I was only safe for now.  
I was the last victim. After all the others were dead.

Somehow it was undeniably clear. They would all die. This entire university was going to go up in ashes. Perhaps even the city.  
Just minutes ago people had been reading and picnicking.  
Minutes ago, Kat was alive.

I beat a fist against the door hopelessly, but I was already sinking into obscurity, bewildered dizziness, reflex unconsciousness. Soon I would be at his mercy too.

It came for me.  
Things were blurred. Things were dark.

And then there was nothing at all.


	5. Hide and Seek

**5**

Waking up was worse than fainting.  
I had to remember everything. Piece it together, like recollecting some horrific dream, barely believing. And after the guilt had taken hold and sprawled me sobbing on that extraterrestrial deck, once the shock had receded, I had to deal with my situation. Kat was dead. I didn't want to follow her.

An armed and murderous alien had just thrown me into his 60's police box that was actually a spaceship.  
And he would likely be coming back.

What did anyone _do _when this happened? If this had ever happened before?

I chose instinct: hide, and hope for the best.  
Where? Where was there? The entire deck was exposed, there was nowhere to cower. No hope.

And then, so conveniently and suddenly that I jumped and screamed, a light flickered on somewhere across the room. A light that revealed a staircase I hadn't noticed. And a corridor.  
Whatever was down there, it was probably going to be better cover than this place. Anything that might be waiting for me surely couldn't be as terrifying or deadly as that man.

Impulsively I sprang up, the dead kick of fear in my stomach making my legs work to their limit.  
Hide and seek had taken on a whole new meaning.

* * *

The Time Lord was surrounded. Men in uniforms and identical cars. Each holding a tantalising weapon towards him, pointed straight at him, ready to shoot.

What vastly unintelligent life forms he had stumbled upon. This was going to be easy. Too easy.

Any humanoid with two brain cells to rub together would know that placing weapons in his reach was the least sensible thing to do. After all, this was a trap. He had only been running around setting off alarms and exploding equipment up until now… waiting all along for them to bring their guns to him.

Now things were going to get interesting.

One quick sweep of these authority figures was all he needed to dig out their weakness.  
"Now really," he flipped his sonic a couple of times, causing quite a stir amongst them, "the impossible extent of your stupidity is offensive to me. What kind of idiots bring electrical earpieces to a screwdriver fight?"

It really was too easy, he thought, as he grabbed an abandoned rucksack and tossed firearm after firearm, round after round, into it. After he had finished off the natives in this small area, he would retire. Find a more convoluted, exciting method of destruction for this planet. Perhaps a more challenging planet altogether.

Besides – there was a much more promising prize awaiting within his ship.  
He was eager to find out what all of this _feeling _was, this absolute craving, and how he could satiate it.  
Something told him he wouldn't be disappointed.


	6. The Chase

**6**

I plunged headfirst into another room.  
A hundred multi-coloured lampshades swung from a midnight blue ceiling like magical lanterns. Filtering their light, the leaves of a great oak tree rustled in an impossible breeze – and beneath the tree, a ready-made picnic basket and blanket. Rolling grass extended beyond.

What _was _this?

What kind of homicidal alien kept a swimming pool in a library?  
Or a chessboard in a greenhouse?

More significantly, why was this place as unsheltered as it was bizarre? There was nowhere to hide – nowhere that would protect me for long.  
My only strategy, it seemed, was to start setting the blanket and hope that when he arrived he was more hungry than murderous.

I actually laughed for sheer hysterical frustration.

Nothing made sense. None of these rooms betrayed anything dark or horrifying. Just… odd beauty.  
A door opened to my left, of its own accord. I nearly fell over with fright.  
Nobody came to kill me.

Inching closer, growing dizzier with confusion every minute, I peeked in.  
A costume department. A whole costume wardrobe, stretching on and on. It looked like the backstage area of a pantomime play. Decorative hats were scattered everywhere. Props, outfits – both tacky and authentic.

Now I had to sit down, next to a crumpled Apollo spacesuit, and take big breaths.

"Are you fucking with me? Is that it?!" I yelled at the corridor, feeling outside of myself, unreal. "Is this how you kill people? Stick them in a fucking mind-fuck spaceship maze? What is this, _Saw_?"

Then.  
An echo rebounding off every corridor wall...  
I heard the front door unlock.

He was here.

A plan formed instantaneously. Running off pure adrenaline, daring insanity.  
I leapt and ran.  
Surprise. That was the only option. Run out, run past, run the hell away.

His silhouette was against the open door, a bag slung across his shoulder, swaggering like a conqueror. His eyes shot through me like headlights.

I pushed my legs harder than they'd ever worked before, burning like a comet towards that rectangle of freedom, head spinning and pounding and clear.

Not fast enough. Never fast enough for his predatory reflexes.  
A snake's flashing head, his arm shot out, smashed against me, winded me, sent me sprawling onto the deck.  
I choked and tried to yell. _Help, for fuck's sake help._

The door slammed shut. The bag dropped. My scream ripped from me, my limbs weak, useless, scrambling.

And then – he bent over me, bent over and let loose the loudest and most piercing roar the earth had ever heard. He bellowed, he thundered, his mouth a contorted tunnel of brute sound, his eyes burning in the centre like blasts of gunfire and exploding stars. His force swept the very cry away from my lungs, blew me backwards where I lay.

I was startled into utter silence, fixed under his glare like a mouse, like an ant.  
I couldn't breathe in or out. Shoulders frozen around my ears. Hands turned up against him.  
Our breathing filled the room. Jagged, rasping.  
I couldn't blink.

"Don't scream again." he rasped, bulging eyes never leaving mine, round like a madman's, limbs trembling taut. "There isn't any point. There isn't anyone."

His eyes darted instinctively to the bag, and mine followed. It lay open. Full of guns.  
Not one gun, not two. More like two dozen.  
Guns.

My sanity failed me, finally. Kicking, writhing, I forced my muscles to work, I forced myself to jump at hectic speed away from this impossible man and back towards the stairs. Back to the first plan.

But he was quick, quick like a violent thing, and I had no sooner gotten to the console than he was upon me. His fingers were iron on my blouse – he pulled with almighty force, and tore the fabric apart, tore all the buttons off in one swift motion. I was spun, slammed against the controls, his body pinning me helplessly. His pinching hands were indomitable. His wrath was heavy and hard. I was exposed, suddenly, explicitly, prey to his eyes as they dropped to the black lace of my bra. Those glinting eyes and the lips parting, a growl of satisfaction forming at the back of his throat.

But my own mind was racing, and my own hands felt for levers and buttons and shapes.  
I found one that felt right.  
I didn't have time to think about it, to wonder at my certainty. I just knew. Like it wanted me to know.

I pressed.  
The entire room jerked and tipped sideways – I held on as he lost his balance, tumbling away, plummeting, catching onto anything he could.

Up the stairs, down the corridor, into a room, any room.  
The door shut behind me before I could even turn to lock it. For a moment I thought he'd trapped me intentionally.  
But then his fists were flailing against the metal, his rage resounding and reverberating, a snarling howling hatred belonging only to the thwarted predator.

"_Open the door! Open the door!_"

The edges of the frame glowed green and buzzed and whined.  
He was using the thing that had killed Kat.

But the door didn't budge. No matter how much he zapped it – maybe for a minute straight – it refused him.  
His frustration echoed around the ship like a nightmare.

"_Open the door __**now**__!_" One great, shocking bang. He had struck the door. One more. "_You are __**mine**__, you __**belong **__to me, you will __**do **__as I say! OPEN THE DOOR._"

A light switched on automatically over my head, and I looked about the room for a place to hide. Just in case.

It was a tiny place. Insignificant in comparison with everything I'd seen so far.  
And bare, completely bare – except for a hammock. A hammock swinging slightly, sedately, stretched between two great metal rings on opposite walls.

And a closet door.

Trembling with every new expulsion of sound from him, I stumbled under the hammock and wrenched at the handle. It opened without resistance, revealing an equally small, tidy, bare space.  
Only a tweed jacket hung up, with a pair of dark trousers, a pinstriped shirt… and a length of material that couldn't be anything but a bow tie.

I didn't have the energy to be confused. Confusion was a term stretched to death. It meant nothing any more.  
I must be dreaming, I thought. I must. Things like this don't happen.  
This wasn't my books coming to life. This wasn't anything remotely like I'd imagined.  
This was just a mess. A bunch of nonsense, terrifying nonsense.

So it couldn't be real.  
I was probably in a mental ward this minute. In a coma. Something.

His shouts were becoming low threats. Then incoherent mumblings. The gaps between them increased.  
Then, after one horribly long silence in which my eyes finally began to sting, I heard his disgruntled huff, and his footsteps receding.

I was safe. Relatively.  
Safe enough to finally be able to collapse onto my side and stifle the fast-rising, consuming, hysterical sobs that clogged up my throat, uncontrollable, brutal. I choked on them until I tired of them, until I began to feel a lack of anything, even fear.

I lay still in the safety of the artificial pool of light. Just breathing. Breathing and breathing.  
Eventually, after an even longer time, I tired of that too. I accepted sleep like a drowning man would accept air.

Perhaps I would wake up somewhere that made more sense this time.


	7. Collision

****To the reviewers and all those who've shown interest, thank you so so much. I have been waiting to write this forever, but up until now I just haven't had the feedback to keep me going. I love every second of this story and I hope you do too. The more reviews I get, the more likely I am to update!  
Sincerely, Dorian.

* * *

**7**

I woke, and waited, and slept, and woke again.

Sometimes I would hear his footsteps. Sometimes the footsteps came to the door. And sometimes, the green light would buzz and fizz.  
The thing that killed Kat.

Once there was a gunshot, so abrupt, so excruciatingly loud that I jumped out of my skin and yelped.  
But it just made a round dent in the metal, and the door never unlocked for him.

I couldn't tell how many hours passed – the artificial light gave away nothing. I'd left my phone in my bag next to Kat's body.

My phone. Mum.  
She wouldn't realise I was missing for a day or two, at least. That was just me – forgetful, distracted.  
But after that?

The ship wasn't in the university any more. Perhaps not even on earth. Why would it be? It was unmistakably alien.

Gradually it began to dawn on me that I would probably never get out. I would die here at his hand, or end up a refugee on a different planet at best.

Mum. That was all that really mattered.  
It just wasn't fair.

My stomach was empty and growling – then it began to feel like it was eating itself. My tongue was dry and my throat began to burn. The only indication of time.  
I slept again. Fitful but dreamless sleep. A blessing.

* * *

I was roused by more footfalls, dangerously close to the door.  
Terror jolted me upright.  
What if he'd found a way in? I couldn't be safe in here forever. It couldn't go on forever.

But there was no green flash, no gunshot.

I sensed more than heard his hand resting on the metal, his forehead pressed to it, his quiet uncertain breathing.  
And then silence. Steady expectant silence, empty of anger.

"She likes you."  
I realised I had sucked in a sharp breath, and felt a chill beginning at the base of my neck.

His voice was purring, softly coarse, like a gentle monster. Slow. Wondering.  
"My ship is - _fond _of you. She won't let me at you... She's all I have now. She's all I remember." I could physically feel the fingertip he trailed along the doorframe. "So if she wants you safe, it must mean something."

My silence coldly illustrated the amount of trust I was inclined to give.

"You must be thirsty," he went on in that tempting growl, "If you don't want to dehydrate you should come out of there within the next twenty hours."  
There was no humour in it. Just factual advice.  
And true; my entire body ached to be quenched.

"As for food, I've found something for you."  
Another pause, as though he expected me to fling the door open to him. Then, finally, his retreating echoes down the corridor.

I sat there for what could have been ten minutes or ten hours. I was too afraid and too hungry to tell.

The only thing that registered, after that indeterminable amount of time, was that I would rather take my chances with an alien than with dehydration.

At least the former _seemed_ liable to changing its mind about killing me.

I reached up, and pulled the pinstriped shirt from its hanger. Exchanged it for my massacred blouse. Did the buttons shakily.  
The rising scent of freshness soothed me, as though it had come straight from mum's ironing board.

My legs were rocks, my skull was a stone. It took draining efforts to haul myself to the door, to turn the lock, to stand on two feet and put one in front of the other.  
One step, two steps, three.

The corridor wasn't as long as I remembered it. Perhaps the ship was making the journey shorter for my benefit.

* * *

A steady, intermittent _throosh_ was the only sound to suggest machinery and movement.

_We must be idling somewhere_, I noted, _else there'd be more going on_.  
Not that I knew what the internal workings of a spaceship ought to sound like. But I was convinced.

I was at the top of the stairs. The deck was spread out surreally below me.  
And then I saw him.

He stood mirroring my stance, like a shadow, like a predator anticipating the victim's next move.  
His awful silver-green eyes were trained on me. Pinioning me.

He was _beautiful_.

Like a black leopard in his jet black jacket, like a hungry lion with his wild brown mane, terrifying and fascinating. A maelstrom, a hurricane, a collapsing star, he was so unspeakably, horrifically _beautiful_. I wanted to tear him to a thousand pieces on the spot. I wanted to spear him, hit him, hurt him.

Because it was an insult to Kat.  
It wasn't fair on Kat that this monster was being kind to me, that this _ogre_ had such an advantage.  
That just staring at him now was slowly setting me on fire from within.

I trod as though in slow motion, down, down, down. Until I stood on the transparent deck, within his reach. Eyes never leaving his. Never disengaging from the war between us, between our very life forces, that crackled and sparked in the air.

He remained perfectly frozen, like a camouflaged feline, right until the moment I came to a standstill.  
Then, like a chess piece, like a king moving beyond his one square into the unknown, he advanced.

His gaze roved over the shirt with an intensity I didn't understand. As though he was trying to see something that wasn't there, both drawn and bewildered. Then his eyes dropped, and I regretted the high-waist blue shorts, the over-the-knee socks, the flesh exposed between. I hated the flush it brought to my cheeks. I resented the new energy that invisibly blossomed around us as he ventured nearer, nearer, with domineering steps.

"Look at you." he breathed, soaked in sensuality. His pupils dilated, disturbing the silver stains. "Hello, _human_."

When I didn't answer he seemed to bristle; he was a mere foot from me, bearing down upon my tiny frame. He inhaled, long and menacing. Then -  
A hand shot out, closed around the back of my head, clenched a handful of my hair. Hurting me. Forced my face upwards, vulnerable, my jaw tight with fear.

His satisfied sigh that was almost a moan... His slanting eyes gazing down like a snake's, down into me, into my wide terror, his own teeth gritted with a mixture of sensation and restraint. His head dipping to my throat, a shock of hair brushing my cheek.  
His nostrils flaring against my jugular as he smelt my racing blood and my fear and my skin, "_Ahh. _Yes. I was right."

"About what?" My words were frail in the close air.

He loosed his grip and sidled around me, examining every angle, breath on the back of my neck, fingers making a wandering line around my waist as he circled.  
"My memory is excellent." he grinned, though a sharp venom spoiled his words, contorted his features.

"You've forgotten my drink." I said. Anything to get him away.  
My blood was so hot.  
"Yes, I have." He was suddenly gone, dancing away from me like a phantom, and I breathed again.

A plain glass was extended to me from beyond a hazy veil. I suddenly realised how thirsty I was.  
Thirsty enough to gulp down a substance that could well have been anything.  
It wasn't anything. It was water. Real water.

"More?"  
I leaned against the stair rail for support, nodding.

I could feel him watching me as I swallowed mouthful after cold mouthful. Watching and waiting.

As soon as I'd finished, the glass was snatched from me. "Food."  
Again I nodded, my stomach gurgling with liquid.

His purring tones drifted towards me. "... Come here."

I focused. He was propped up by a curious machine that hadn't been there last time.  
A curious inchoate gleaming in his eye caught me. His hand beckoned. The corner of his mouth threatened to turn upwards while his brows drew down.

I realised it was thrilling to him.  
To call me, and to see if I would obey.  
My stomach jerked, with a deep sickness, a sickly excitement. I was repelled and pulled all at once.  
It made me want to kill something.

But I did as I was told anyway. Because I wanted to live.  
And because it was him. The words came from his mouth.  
I knew, instinctively, that I could never disobey that sumptuous mouth, with its lopsided leer.

"What do you like to eat?" that mouth asked me, moving like sensation itself, mesmerising as it betrayed straight white teeth and a soft dark tongue.

I seemed to jolt back into myself, abruptly, shamefully.

I squared my shoulders at him.  
He wasn't going to bewitch me so easily. He wasn't going to get away with it.  
"You killed Kat." I said blankly.

He was intrigued by this. He shifted, only slightly.  
"Who is Kat?"  
"That girl? The first girl, who you electrocuted?"  
Saying it was far worse than ever thinking it. My lungs wouldn't work properly. I had to speak in stilted bursts. "My best friend?! _That _girl?"

"Yes. She got in my way."  
"So did I. She was the reason – I attacked you."  
"Then you would be dead too, if you'd had an electric weapon, like she did." His voracious gaze scraped over me. "I must say, I'm glad you didn't. You're... it's strange…"  
He was about to elaborate, but suddenly frowned. "What are you doing?"

"What?"  
"What is that?" He slunk towards me, ignoring my alarm, fixated single-mindedly on my face.

His fingers reached out. Touched my cheek, and came away glistening.  
"You're…" he stared, touched again, "You're _crying_. You're crying."

"Yes I'm crying." I trembled with utter rage, barely keeping my voice down. "Don't you know what crying means?"

His head swivelled away. "I don't know. I think – I used to."  
"You _used _to know what _crying_ is?"

He seemed to convulse, grabbing at his own hair like a madman, caving in on himself in a split second.  
"_Don't ask me questions_." he spat at me from under his arm.

I seethed back at him, too overwhelmed with hatred to be afraid. "I'll _ask_ you whether you've ever _watched a friend die_." I hunched with unutterable fury. "Do you know how to _hurt _because they're gone? _Do you know how much I want to kill you because you killed her_? Because it wasn't _fair_?!"

I couldn't stop it. My fist came out of nowhere, connected with his head, thudding dully.

He emerged from the shelter of his arm. His eyes were round for once. Like a child's.

Then my punches were coming thick and fast, wild, untrained, hardly effective. But enough to sting him, enough to madden him, enough to make him seize both my wrists in his claws and use all of his monstrous force to bend me to the floor, to cripple me as I yelled and screamed and struggled, to thrust me flat on my back with my arms pinned above my head, to roar back at me in a frenzied, incoherent statement of domination. He knelt over my defenceless body, growling and snarling, teeth bared, thighs ramming hard against my legs, nails digging into my skin.

We raced with our laboured breathing. Whose chest heaved the quickest? Whose heart pulsed most violent?  
I was light-headed. Transported. Hating myself.  
I had stopped fighting, and I didn't want to think about what that meant.

His awful searing eyes thundered into mine. His breath was scorching on my skin, burning my lips.  
So close.

"There are no _friends _here." he rasped, "There is no _fair_. I don't cry. I don't _tolerate_."

For a long time, we stayed there. Our respiration continued to echo around the room. It didn't slow down.  
We teetered on the edge of something.

But for some reason he never acted. He never moved. And until he did, I would have the strength to resist.  
Especially as I was immobilised under his weight.

Finally, he snapped his mouth shut with a huff. Abandoned me. Rose to his feet, watched me struggling to mine.  
"Now. What would you like to eat?"

I turned without another glance at him, grasped the stair rail, and fled back to that tiny room. Back to the timeless hunger.

However ugly it got – I wasn't going to eat from hands soaked in Kat's blood.

This time he didn't follow me.


	8. Discoveries

**Author's Note: **There are lots of references to the console, the TARDIS's origins and other wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff in this chapter. I spent a long time on the official Who site looking at trivia, and also on Wikipedia, doing solid research. So if you're a 2005 onwards fan and get confused, especially about where the TARDIS comes from, just Wikipedia it!  
With kind regards, Dorian.

* * *

**8**

Hunger does things to you.  
When you're lying on a closet floor curled up around your empty stomach, aching and growling, like a black hole at your centre, threatening to collapse your very body into it…  
Well. It was the least human I had ever felt.

I was angry at Kat. I _hated _Kat.  
Why did she have to die bravely, and leave me in endless suffering for her sake?  
Why couldn't I accept just one meal? Why did I have to be better than that?

What would she be saying now, sitting next to me under the silly tweed jacket, with her legs crossed and eyes wide like wells? Would we be planning an escape? Would we cry, and say we were glad we had each other?

Would she have been just slightly thrilled at the prospect of being captured by a mysterious, hostile – handsome – alien?  
I could see the wondering glint in her grey eyes even now. The same look she'd get when we talked about the last book we'd read. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That was what she'd been gushing over, just before our lecture.  
Comedy in space. The thought was painful.

My anger should have blocked out the emptiness of hunger. Instead, it amplified it.

I hadn't heard his footsteps for hours, though there were other noises. Noises that made me think of swirling tunnels of fire and colour, seething black matter and billions upon billions of stars and planets, systems, galaxies.

The time vortex. We were travelling through the time vortex.  
_How did I know that?_

Abruptly, I was too distracted to think about time vortexes. Because all of those noises stopped, and a different noise rang out.  
The snap of a door closing. The front door, closing.  
He was gone?

I sprang up. Forgot the black hole that was in my belly. Forgot everything.  
He was gone. Temporarily.  
Perhaps I could go too. Perhaps this was my chance.

I flung myself under the hammock and through the bedroom door, hurtling down the short corridor to the deck.  
The ship's engines – no – the ship's _heart_, was the only thing still on, humming musically. Comforting, welcoming. I slowed down despite myself as I passed the console, delaying the moment when I would burst through that Police Box door into a new world. He had only just left. I had some time.

Without his presence overshadowing everything, the controls room was _peaceful_.  
And something else. Something tangible in the air. Something about that melodic hum, something about the soft lights and glimmering panels. Something magical.

This ship was a rogue. A beautiful rogue. I could feel it just in the warm atmosphere, in that eternal sound.  
"You travel through time and space." I told it wonderingly, obvious and stupid. "… Kat would have loved you."  
The console beckoned.

A few shaking steps brought me close enough to touch its sheened surface. I circled a few times, caressing the old taps, the typewriter, the scanner, the retro telephone. Things that felt more familiar, that suggested an inexplicable connection to Earth. The Earth he'd been trying to destroy.

But the more I circled, the more familiar _everything _seemed to feel. Like a name, or a hundred names, on the tip of my tongue. Like a memory blurred by time.

"You." I stopped at one side of the hexagon, eyeing the display dials, the levers. "The mechanical panel." I touched its gyroscopic stabiliser. _Gyroscopic stabiliser_. I had never even imagined words like those in my entire life. Certainly not in GCSE physics.

_Excellent grasp, but lacking in enthusiasm_ – my teachers had written in yearly reports. Top marks across the board, even in Maths.

But who would want to learn about Pythagoras theorem and velocity and displacement, when the universe of Tolkien, Wilde, Fitzgerald, Conrad and Carroll was waiting, in open colourful books, brimming with all the beauties of language? Mum hadn't minded. _You'll go much further than me, whatever you do_, was her only contribution when I chose my A-levels. And now, this.

"Helm, navigation, diagnostic, communications, _fabrication_!" I was running now, running around the console with the true excitement of the scientist, the thrill of discovery, coursing through my blood. "_What_ is happening?"

I had to sit down, really convinced that I was going to pass out from combined starvation and bewilderment. My head span – or rather, it began to spin more heavily than it had been for the past few hours. My body felt like straw. I couldn't quite think properly.

Perhaps the hunger was getting to me. Perhaps I was imagining all of these names. Probably delirious.  
That was when my eyes fell on the machine, the machine that was supposed to give food.  
A telepathic fabricator. A rudimentary one – built for flavour and sustenance, not texture or shape. But still.

"Stop it!" I yelped, actually hitting myself over the head. "You're freaking me out!"

But I knew where to put my hand, on the left switch, as I imagined _fish and chips, fish and chips_ with the ferocity of famished desperation. And three seconds later, I was extracting a silver-wrapped bar from the dispense chamber.

Another five seconds later it was gone, and I was wishing telepathically for my next course.

Finally, satiated and stuffed, weak but satisfied, I left the poor machine alone and returned to the console. The beckoning, welcoming panels of foreign familiar things.  
That humming. That beautiful sound, still permeating everything within the room.

"What's your name?" I asked it, fondly, "What are you?... I can hear your heart, can't I?"  
That mysterious centre, brooding somewhere within. Connected to the stars. Connected to the whole wide universe, somehow… the technology of time travel.

I reached up, and laid my palm flat against the central column. Regarded its dim turquoise glow.  
"Oh… Of course." I found myself breathing, hardly knowing the words before they were out of my mouth. "I can see it, I can see you."

A burnt-orange planet, brilliant with the sheen of quantum force fields, cresting against the black star-spangled sky… visions of silver leaves and rolling scarlet grass, mountain peaks and a towering citadel of shining gold. It all rested within me, somewhere. Like a past life. Like a secret childhood world, like a Neverland.

"A bioship. That's you, isn't it? Grown from the coral, like – like gemstones. And the Eye of Harmony. _The Eye of Harmony_." I watched the tendons in my hand bunching up, taut with concentration and exhilaration. "That black hole, the artificial power source, they built it… the power of the vortex. The secret of time, the formula for immortality. That's where you're from."

I could see it. I had never seen it, but I could see it now, as though recalling something I'd witnessed with my own waking eyes. This, all this, was triggering it. Triggering memories I'd never known I had.  
"Am I going mad?" I asked the room at large.

But the telepathic fabricator had worked for me. Really worked.  
And it was so real. Everything, every word, every picture – I believed in it with a grounded certainty, without thinking. Just knowing.

"Are you giving me all this? Are you putting it in my head?"

It was only then that I noticed the screen, hanging innocently from its frame around the central column, the time rotor.

A screen that displayed readings.  
Readings of a planet.  
He must have left it on as he went out.

A three-dimensional scan and a single word. _Tivoli_.  
"Tivoli?" I echoed, and then jumped in fright as the screen altered.  
A line of writing. English writing.

_Tivoli. A grey planet whose inhabitants take an unusual delight in being oppressed._

"Are you joking? Voice controls?" I paused. "I thought this ship was isomorphic."  
I hit myself again. All these _words_.  
"Have you overridden his voice authority? Just for me?"

No response. Of course it couldn't reply to everything I asked it. Conversational answers weren't programmed into the visual software.  
Unless…  
"Do you have a voice interface?" I wondered aloud.

"Voice interface enabled."

"_AARRGGHHH_!" I leapt back, epileptic with shock.  
It was _his _voice. _His_ body, appearing out of nowhere. For a second I thought he'd been there all along, hiding, and now he'd jumped out to attack.

But no. It was a hologram.  
I stuck my whole arm through him just to make sure, and then sat down on the deck heavily.  
"You really fucking scared me."

"No harm was intended." He gazed translucently down at me, neutral and cold. For once, not leering.

"Right. Yeah." I tried not to look at him. As my eyes dragged down, I noticed he was wearing the tweed and bow tie. Another paradox. "So. Ship. What's your name?"  
"Time and relative dimensions in space, otherwise known as the TARDIS."  
"Yes. Yes, you are the TARDIS. Of course you are."

His eyes weren't silver-streaked. Just green. Still beautiful.  
I got the feeling that I was looking at a past version. Perhaps a nicer one, too.

The eyes. The eyes must have something to do with it.

"What about your pilot?"  
"Unofficial title: The Doctor."  
"And his official title?"  
"Classified."

"Okay. Well, what planet is he from?"  
"Gallifrey. Located within the constellation of Kasterborous. Galactic coordinates: ten-zero-eleven-zero-zero by zero-two from galactic zero centre."

"Right." I thought about standing up, then decided against it. "Right. And what, what _is_ he?"  
"The Doctor is a Time Lord."

The words rang true and plain. There. Yes.  
A stirring in my chest told me I was on the right path. I was still hungry – but now only for knowledge.

I looked his hologram image square in the face. Felt an electric bolt run through me.

"Give me all records of the Doctor and the Time Lords."


	9. The Medicinal Scientist

**9**

I was standing barely a foot from him, my face turned up to his. Not knowing when I'd risen from the floor. Not knowing how long I had been listening. Only now registering the two haphazard streaks of wetness on my cheeks.

The hologram set his jaw and waited for my next question.  
Now the silence cut down against me like a brutal oppression. Anticipating my reaction.

"He can never know."  
My voice sounded cold in the warm close air. Like a blast of winter.  
"He can't ever know. If he remembers – what do I do?"

His translucent image regarded me carefully.  
"Make sure he knows…" his slow, rough tones were finally tinged with emotion, "that he isn't alone."  
"How soon will he be back?"  
"Scanning... He is returning. He will arrive in approximately two minutes."

"You need to go. Wait –"  
"What is it, Sarah Temple?"  
I ignored his use of my almost-divorced father's surname, and asked the more important question.

"Why me?"  
"You were chosen."  
"Yes, but why?"  
"You were the only option."  
"_Why_?"

His blank expression was infuriating. Even his bow tie was infuriating.  
"Because you are his true companion."

I was about to reiterate my confusion when he disappeared.  
I only just had time to run to the telepathic fabricator before the real one entered, like the central force at the heart of a storm, brutal and intent and unstoppable and still so beautiful. Perhaps now more so.

I realised now that the leather jacket didn't overly suit him. The dark grey tee was a pitiful comparison to the hologram's pinstriped shirt and braces. The tweed cried out to be worn again.

The professor. The Doctor.  
The medicinal scientist. The pioneer of healing.  
Needing me to heal him.

My very thoughts seemed loud, loud enough for him to hear. I pretended to be flummoxed about the machine.  
Pretended to be enraged and vengeful, like I should have been. For Kat.

But I couldn't bring myself to rage, even after all I'd learnt.  
Only a kind of deep awed pity overcame me, made me want to embrace him there, on the spot. Made me want to say it, over and over, until the words were beaten into his head forever like drums.

_You are not alone._


	10. Double Take

**10**

"Ah," he sneered, coming to a swaggering halt just inside the TARDIS, "you've decided to join me. Good. I want to show you something."

There is was again. The hand extended in summoning, the dark silver-splashed eyes shifting over me from beneath shadowy brows. The curious deep surge between us, the surge that was his dominant will. His searching, searing gaze as he tried to control me, tried to sap up the pleasure of subtle violence and force.

The universe had tried to cage him, even tried to kill him, because of the threat they saw him as.  
Oh, if only they could see him now.

This time I came to him without hesitation.  
This was the Doctor. This was the defender of Earth, the last Time Lord, and I trusted him even in his current state.

"You are so _strange_," he laughed as he watched me approaching, his expression twisting into satisfaction, "Look at you. My little plaything. Come and see, it really is a wonder."  
His outstretched hand suddenly bit through the air and grasped the too-long sleeve of the pinstriped shirt, dragging me faster towards the doors. Without time to marvel at the implications of treading upon another planet, I was suddenly thrust out onto one. I tumbled out of the ship, his grasp still fast upon me, and stood at his side with my jaw slack and my eyes popping.

We were strategically placed at the top of a building. The very top. Balancing out on the edge, with an entire alien city spread out beneath our feet. And in the grey, unfamiliar city, in the streets and parks and windows… a hundred thousand life forms were assembled. From this distance they looked human. Humans with pointed ears.

All of them bowing, or prostrate upon the floor. Every face turned to the ground. Nobody daring to peek up.

Except one.  
A single ratty countenance bounced and waved from the window of an executive-looking building. It was shouting, its meaning muffled by distance. Only one word stood out, repeated a dozen times, freshly burnt into my mind.  
_Doctor_.

He was ignoring it. Very thoroughly.

"What is this?" I breathed, though I knew very well.  
"The most invaded planet in the universe," he drawled, his eyes forever sweeping over the submissive slaves, their sheer numbers. "Though I doubt their other masters were quite as impressive."

_Master_. I shuddered internally.  
Trust him to accidentally associate himself with one of his own worst enemies.  
But this was tame, compared to his encounter with my planet. Invading a world that appreciated subjection?  
It was almost a kind act.

I was tugged abruptly and unceremoniously back into the TARDIS, where his fist unclasped from my shirt sleeve.

My attention was caught by a flash in his other hand.  
"What is _that_?" I asked, genuinely this time.  
His mocking mouth smirked lopsidedly at me beneath his coldly blazing eyes.  
"Nothing."

I was already moving towards him, my mouth forming around a shrill "no".  
But his hand clapped down upon the device. The TARDIS shivered and jerked with the building it sat upon. The whole planet was jolting and shaking, like an earthquake had taken hold of it.

"_What have you done_?" I screeched, stumbling backwards.

His arms shot out like grappling hooks and I was caught by the wrist – he pinioned me within the crook of one arm, both my hands gripped helpless in one of his, fingers digging into me. I kicked. He clutched tighter, squeezing the breath from me.

We lurched like a couple of conjoined animals, me making sudden violent lunges away only to be forced back, him trying to drag me to the doors again. His body rammed into mine with every conflict. I could feel his blistering ragged breath on my face as he rumbled and growled with the exertion. Finally with a snarl he overcame me, and I was teetering on the edge of the TARDIS doorstep, his fingers seizing my jaw to lock my head in place.

I shut my eyes against the sight. Tried to block the sounds.

"Look, human." he hissed, shaking me hard. "LOOK."  
"Don't make me!"  
"_LOOK_."

His voice was like a mountain avalanche, crowned with thunder and lightning. I quaked to the core.  
And as I felt his grip on my throat, I finally obeyed.

"See it." He seemed drunken with awe, awed in the presence of magnificence and beauty. "Can you feel it?"

I watched the crust of the planet crumbling away into nothingness. All those beings, falling into the gulf.  
The rat-faced alien screaming in his office window.  
_Doctor_.

His body suddenly left mine. I was free, and for a moment it felt like falling. I was tumbling into the abyss too.

But he was only zipping up to the console, flicking switches and levers, ensuring that the TARDIS stayed aloft as the building beneath it toppled. I could hear it whining. I could hear the grief in its working sounds.

I stood there, pinned by the weight that my eyes had absorbed, barely breathing.  
It took every ounce of my will to turn and look at him. The Doctor. A saviour of worlds. The fallen angel.

"Those people would have worshipped you," I muttered. "They would have let you enslave them without a second thought. They _trusted_ you to oppress them."  
"I know. That's why I came here."  
He continued to stalk around the hexagonal deck, pressing and pushing, and the doors shut behind me as the ship began to dematerialise.

I sank onto the short flight of steps. I felt incredibly hollow. Winded.  
"What did you do?"

"They had no weapons. Should have thought of it before. But they did have an artificially controlled gravity core, and – well. You saw for yourself." He paused to give me his full scrutiny. "What did you think of it?"  
I couldn't muster the energy to glower at him. I was still processing it.

The Doctor. A few minutes ago he had been the Doctor. A hologram image with a story of overwhelming sadness and loneliness and hope. Tweed and bow ties and green eyes.

I had jumped too soon... I had jumped too soon.  
He wasn't that man any more.  
And perhaps he never would be.

"Why do you do it?" I heard myself asking, in a voice that barely carried.  
"What?"  
Louder. "Why do you kill people?"

_People_. I had referred to those aliens as _people _twice now. And of course they were people. Not just because they were humanoid. Because they were… well, they just were. And I could see why he had spent so much effort in saving whole planets from threats like this. Why he cared so much.

And I was helpless to his will. I couldn't possibly save them like he had saved them all.  
I glanced at the console. The heart of the TARDIS.

_You are the only option._

I wasn't helpless. I was the least helpless person in the universe.  
I just didn't know where the hell I was even going to start.


	11. Brute Force

**11**

"Why do I kill people?"  
He echoed my question as he left the TARDIS to manage the journey on its own. Apparently he didn't care all too much where he went next, or even if the ship made it to the other end of the vortex. If we both expired here, right now, he wouldn't think twice about the tragedy of it. He would probably be glad.

An end to his suffering.

I stood up, instinctively on the defence, as he sauntered towards me with deliberate, slow, predatory paces.  
He kept on coming, steady and stealthy as a prowling cat, gaze ever fixed upon my face.

There was something curious, dangerously playful that smouldered about him, a magnetism that pulsated from his body, from his taut fluid muscles, threatening to wind its tendrils around me and suck me in. It was so deeply rooted, so primal that I barely recognised it, couldn't put it into real words. Something indefinably, alluringly _there_.

His desire. His craving that overshadowed and permeated everything. Seeping through me like intoxicating hot liquid, no matter how I tried to block it out. Bullied and burned me, churned me up into a mixture of contrasting feelings and hesitations. His image, those sensuous smirking lips and that sharp treacherous stare. So striking. Literally striking my eyes and stunning my thoughts, making my stomach lurch in pure reaction.

My feet slid tentatively backwards as his swept forwards, keeping the space between us. The TARDIS jolted and bucked, but our shadow-dance didn't falter. Back, back, back. Our steps quickened, our breath resounding…

Until my shoulders hit the solid glossy doors, and there was nowhere to run to.  
He was a wolf, suddenly ravenous and darting, his body closing in on mine in a wild frenzy of rushing limbs.  
And then he was upon me.

It happened so quickly, but every instant was clear-cut, heightened, precise. His hands firm on my waist. My small frame lifted like a rag doll and shoved against the hard painted wood. His body surging against me, parting my legs to pin me with his hips. His angular features level with mine. The warm flood of air from his open mouth. The reverberating growls in his chest. His palms and fingers working their way up my flanks, finding my arms, sliding up and up until he had my wrists pressed helpless above me. His heat invading me, making everything spin and intensify with adrenaline. His closeness. The crackling energy seething wherever our bodies connected.

I was afraid. Whether more of him or myself I couldn't tell.

His tongue passed over his lips as though readying himself for a feast. His voice was gruff, coarse, like grating stones and cracking ice. Eyes always, always drilling into mine. The silver blotches stood out astonishingly.

And while I quivered all over with the chill of dread, I was also softening and melting from the inside out, like oil paints, yellow and ochre and deep pulsing scarlet.

"Why?" he echoed hoarsely, and for a moment I thought I saw the mutilated green halos darken with a real sadness and doubt. "Why do you do anything?"

I hung mid-air in speechless apprehension. Anticipation.

"I kill," he breathed over me, tipping his jaw in stiff defiance, coming closer, closer, "because it makes me _feel_. Surely you did too. The wave swelling over you. The wonder of it."  
"I felt _something_," I spat back, "it wasn't _wonder_."

His briefly raised brows told me I had shocked him. The lips parted and the pupils widened, again with a shadow of hesitation.  
Then the look began to simmer, to liquefy and transform… the deep hot centre rising upwards like flame into his irises. Something heavy, something hazy passed into our interlocked stares, mute and strong and stirring.

That endless desire.

"And what apart from killing?" his hushed rasping tones thrilled through me, "What about this? Don't you feel this?"  
He eased his grasp on my wrists to slowly trace back down, down, one hand curling around my neck, the other resting on my waist. His fingers woven through my curls. Barely clenching this time. No pain. Just the friction of his skin, and the soft open lips and the slanting brows resolving into an almost tender glance.

He breathed out as I inhaled. His flavour in my lungs.  
They ached to let loose a sound, just the softest moan. It was too much.

"I don't want to kill you." he murmured. "It's almost better."

And then – and then with a great rush, forcing my head back against the doors – his lips crashing firm and tight against mine, the tension in his jaw as the moment lingered and the groan finally ripped from my throat. The sharp heady intake of air afterwards, filling me with him, with his scent, with his fury and lust.

The gradual softening of their shape as they flowed, opened and closed over mine again, moving me with him –

"Argh!"  
He leapt backwards as I tumbled to the ground, clutching his lower lip in a surprise devoid of anger.  
"You bit me!?"  
He looked like a child who had been smacked. For an instant, I thought he was another person.  
I thought he was cured.

But then, inevitably, the black cloud began to form around his features.  
I straightened, determined not to submit this time. "You can't just do that to me when you feel like it!"

"I _do _what I _like_." he blazed, beginning to recover the space between us.  
"Well it's my body and I'll protect it if _I _like!"

"You think you can defend yourself?" he slammed me back against the wood, quick as a lunging cobra, expression contorted with rage.  
"You think you can deny me? _I am the Lonely God, the Oncoming Storm, the Predator_."

The moment the words were out of his mouth, his jaw slackened and his eyes snapped wide open, so wide it hurt to see. He flinched as though he'd been shot.

My veins froze inside me.

He didn't blink. Didn't breathe. His hands were vices on my arms.  
And then he was gone. Fleeing like a fire fanned by a gale.

The TARDIS jumped and pitched as his figure disappeared into the corridor.

I forced myself to stay upright, and staggered to the console.  
It wasn't going to land all by itself.


	12. A Daunting Task

**12**

I lurched for the gyroscopic stabiliser, teasing the ship into a relatively smooth flight. We were close, I knew instinctively. A glance behind me at the round screen – it must have been an external scanner because I could see, I could _see_ the time vortex whirling past outside – confirmed this. Things were thinning out.

Now just to land it on the planet he had coordinated before assaulting me.

My hands hovered over the zigzag plotter and time altimeter before spontaneously choosing the latter. Nearly there, it told me. Nearly time to shove the brakes on. _Now _the plotter. Steady – another brush at the gyroscope stabiliser on the other side of the console. All this running around! More zigzagging, bringing the overhead screen about to measure my progress. I nearly forgot the materialise function and had a bit of a panic, but prevented disaster just in time – appearing in the centre of a planet wasn't on my list of desirable things at the moment – why was I saying all these clever things in my head?

The locking down mechanism came last. Or the breaks, as I would have called them in mum's car at home.  
Mum's car. At home.

"Voice interface." I called, more because I wanted a distraction from the thought than anything.  
"Voice interface enabled."

I glanced at him. At that tweed and bow-tied man with the ordinary eyes and the face empty of hatred.

"Hello again."  
"Hello, Sarah Middleton."  
"Just Sarah. Please."

He didn't answer. Probably bored with my human fuss already.

"So. He called himself a lot of names, before he left." I frowned at nothing, listening to the sound of us materialising on the surface of a new world. Its mystery called to me so lustrously. But this was more intriguing... more worrying. "The Oncoming Storm. The – Lonely God, was it? And the Predator… What did they mean? Did they happen after the Time War?"

The War was as far as I'd gotten, but something told me there was more to him than that.  
Such as how he'd gotten this way. Why he couldn't remember.  
So many questions. And he could come back at any moment.  
Or he might never come back.

Perhaps I should find him, and make sure nothing… nothing awful had happened to him.  
But what good would it do without the necessary knowledge? If he was remembering…

"Yes. The names were acquired over a span of three hundred years."  
"Three hundred years? Since the War?!"  
"In his timeline, yes."

I felt like I needed to sit down, for the fifth time that day – or at least, since I'd last slept. Three lifetimes since the War, and so much more before that. And I'd only had a brief sketch of his dealings with the Time Lords. Who knew what he'd been up to while he was running across the stars, and apparently being exiled to earth?  
How many earth lives had he touched in that time?

"Tell me. Tell me how he got them." I made for the leather chair and tried to relax into it.  
"The first was given by the Face of Boe, who prophesised that –"  
"Wait, the Face of Boe?"  
"The Doctor's former companion, made immortal by my power within the human Rose Tyler."

I goggled.  
"Did you just say _companion_? A companion and a human?"  
"The Doctor's companions have always been human."  
"He's had companions? How many?"  
"Fifty-five."

I didn't know how to feel about this.  
"And they became attached to him? In all his different – forms?"  
"For the most part."

"You said last time – you just said he'd forgotten it all. The War, the Time Lords. Has he forgotten all those people too? Has he forgotten earth?"  
"He has forgotten everything. What he protected he now resents. All but me."

"And what made him forget?"  
"The Souls tried to take him. It backfired. His mind was lost. Nearly."  
"The Souls?"  
"Parasites. Inserted into the body and attached to the brain, whereby they control the hosts' minds."

"And he wasn't about to lie down and take that." I realised on my own, "The last Time Lord. The last brilliant mind."

Silence swept over the deck. I brooded for some time.  
The sheer lifespan of this man daunted me. It was like entering a library dedicated to history and being asked to read every page of every book immediately. I needed short cuts. Who knew how long it would take for him to do something else that I'd be powerless to prevent.

"So… he's been travelling the universe. For what, about a thousand years? If I remember the figures right."  
"Yes."  
"And apart from the War… apart from that…" I looked at his steady expression and hoped. "Would you say he was a good man? The Doctor? After that – did he change for the better?"

And then he did something I thought no voice interface could ever do.  
He smiled.

The warmth of it spread over and through me, as soothing and wonderful as the relief that came with it.  
"Better than ever," he said, "to those who knew him. To strangers he became known as a great warrior, a threat. They tried to retain him, kill him off, and he just kept getting better. Finally, he outwitted his own death, while everyone else believed."

"So what's all that about Oncoming Storms and Predators?"  
"Names given by the Daleks." The smile was abruptly gone. "His most dangerous enemies. Though they remember him no longer."

The respite was like a drug now. Like morphine. Dulling every fear, every doubt.  
If I could have saved him even as the man from the Time War, I could save him so much more easily now.

"So there's hope?" I clarified, "That I can convince him to be that? Again?"  
"You must. He knows too much, and too little. He will tear the universe apart piece by piece."

"But – what if he remembers?"  
"There is more to remember that would break him than the War."  
"Like what?"

There was a pause, as though even the TARDIS was having difficulty with sharing its past.

And then it dawned on me.  
Fifty-five companions. Where were they now?

"He was alone when the Souls took him, wasn't he? All those people – well, a thousand years. Of course they couldn't last… What happened to them?"  
"Most were left behind. Many left him. Some died."  
I flinched.

"And he was attached to them?"  
"He couldn't not be. He was the Doctor."  
"Exiled to Earth." I recollected softly.  
"His true home."

I frowned. "Is that why he hasn't killed me?"  
"In part. I have contributed."  
"Ha! Yes you have. I never thanked you."  
"I brought him to you. Do not thank me."  
"And you feel guilty, do you? For putting me in danger? You have feelings now?"  
"Feeling enough."

I stared at the hologram intently, mulling it all over.

"What can I do?"  
"You are already doing it."  
"But it's only me he wants safe, and he's only intent on one thing anyway. The rest is dirt to him."  
"You must show him why it shouldn't be."  
"_How_?"  
"You are the human. You have the instincts. I brought him to you because you can do what I cannot."

I dropped my head into my hands and tried not to tear my hair out.  
"I can barely help myself. Let alone the rest of the universe."

No reply. Apparently it agreed with me, or was disappointed.

"Would I have loved him?" I suddenly found myself asking through my fingers.  
There it was, out there, in the open. All that pent up magnetism. All that yearning.

I'd been feeling guilty for my attraction towards a monster. Now at least I knew that I'd been drawn to something else. Something underneath. Something of his raw power and his heart – hearts – struggling to liberate themselves. And now… and now even though I hadn't a clue where to even start, a small but piercing part of me right at the core was wondering what would happen if the TARDIS and I ever did succeed. If we saved the universe.

Saving the universe.  
Who else would ever have the privilege?  
And yet the thing that stood out to me was inexorably _him_. As he was, or at least as he could be.

"Some have loved him. One married him. She is gone now."  
"What was her name?"  
"River Song. Part human, part Time Lord."  
"Do I have time to listen to that story?"  
"Probably not."

I breathed out heavily, and stood up to pace around for a bit. I needed some physical work to take my mind off the magnitude of the mental challenge of this strange spaceman's past, and the uncertainty of his future.

"I don't know what to think, at the moment."  
He waited patiently while I tramped about the deck, circling, always circling.

"What's he doing right now?"  
"He has gone to the zero room."  
"Huh?"  
"It is cut off from the entire universe."  
"Wow. So he needs some space too. Do you think… do you think he's remembering?"  
"His condition is uncertain. It is doubtful that this will have sparked anything remarkable."

I paced. Paced. Paced.  
"I need air. I need to go out. Show me the planet's surface."

The monitor upon the wall flickered, and I saw cliffs.  
Cliffs by any standards were normal enough to go for a walk on.

"The inhabitants must be informed." he said flatly.  
"Of his arrival? Yes, I suppose they'd better. And then we need to get away before he tries to blow them up too."  
"Do not linger. And be cautious."

I looked to the doors. Those doors with a whole new world waiting outside. For me. Only me, out of the whole human race. The weight and glamour and beauty of it kindled, and I allowed it to grow within me, allowed myself to put it all into perspective. The impossible, wonderful, awful magic of it all.

"If Neil Armstrong could see me now." I breathed. "I won't be long, but… just… wow."

I crossed the deck and descended the steps like one in a dream. Caressed the lock, turned it with deliberate slowness. Savouring each moment as though it were my last.  
It could well be, after all.

Nothing was certain out here, in this never-ending night of space and stars and wild dreams and adventures. Nothing could be trusted, though you had to grab it all. All the beauty. While you could.

The door swung. Everything I knew was behind me.  
Everything I'd ever wanted was ahead.

I stepped into the light of a different sun, in a different galaxy.  
Into the great unknown.


	13. More of a List

**13**

"Huh." I heard myself saying, as the TARDIS door closed behind me.

The cliffs were there, without a doubt. Orange tinted with dusky violet. Hardly earth coloured, but that could be forgiven. No – my issue was that cliffs generally indicated an ocean. And _that_ was most definitely lacking.

A dizzyingly endless horizon of lavender-coloured sand glared at me instead.  
I was standing on the line between sea and shore. Or where it had been, and where purple earth now melted into auburn, like clashes on an artist's palette.

Far out, I could just about catch the ragged lines of coral reefs – perhaps – wilted in the sun.

The sun.  
Or whatever they called it here. The nearest star, really.  
Now that I thought about it, this place was uncomfortably hot. And bright. I started to be glad about the shorts for once.

A quick spin told me that it wasn't just non-ocean out here.  
There was a non-jungle too. Or more precisely, a dead jungle. With dead husks of trees like manmade poles, thick enough to still be sheltered. And menacing. All grey and blistered and unmoving.

Almost unmoving.

Before I could blink again, I suddenly had company. Lots of company.  
"Don't move!" a voice indiscernible from their numbers cried out, "We are armed. Don't move."

Parts of the trees were breaking off, growing legs and arms. Extraordinarily long arms. And heads, all bald and flattened at the top. Their bark skin crackled and flaked as they motioned towards me.

Those without crude weapons to carry moved like apes, using their knuckles as extra support for their legs. Spears and clubs were clutched in some hands – and though their arms looked flimsy in their length, I didn't want to test them. I stood stock still, even raising my hands in an unconscious peace gesture.

As they neared, almost ten of them, I tried not to stare at their faces. Four eyes. Two placed where the temples usually were… They must have had nearly 360 degree vision.  
Their wide chins, coupled with the flattened skulls, gave them a box-headed look.

And yet I was the odd one out.  
And outnumbered.

"What are you?" the same voice called.  
They were edging, edging towards me. I did my best to remain still, and most of all calm.  
"I'm a human." I answered, hating my shaky words, "I don't mean any harm. I promise."

The leader made itself apparent by suddenly swiping his arm through the air. A signal.  
I only realised when it was too late, when their surprisingly strong hands were grasping me, pinning me, and I was shrieking.

"The silver ring. Look for the ring." the leader barked.  
My eyelids were forced back by two spindly fingers. I breathed hard through my mouth, seizing up.  
"What ring?" I gasped out, wondering how on earth my eyeballs could be connected to jewellery.

"No silver." one of my apprehenders said in a relieved tone.  
I was released, a lot more gently than I'd been grabbed.  
"Silver?" I yelped, making them all jump away from me. "What are you looking for?"

"It's the sign of _them_."  
"But why a ring?"  
"That is the sign."  
"No spots, no blotches?"

They gazed at me as though I had just turned into a starfish. It was disconcerting, being looked at from eyes on the sides of heads _and_ eyes at the front, and not always together.

"Why have you come?" the leader gesticulated towards the Police Box, standing ostentatiously on the orange beach, "What is your craft? Are you an invader?"  
At this, the spears and clubs were clutched a bit tighter. I tried not to hyperventilate.

"No, no! I'm just visiting. Accidentally. My acquaintance – travelling partner – is ill. With silver spots in his eyes. But no rings!" I added hastily as expressions hardened, "I'm trying to cure him, but I just - needed a bit of air. Nice outdoorsy, planety… air."

None of them looked male or female.  
Therefore I was uncertain about how aggressive the act was meant to be when – I could only call it their chief – leaned forwards and growled, "Is your _partner _dangerous in any way?"

"He's otherwise engaged. Not interested in invading or harming or anything like that."

She – he – it – was afraid.  
They were all afraid. Of the things that had silver rings in their eyes.

Well... that made a whole bunch of us who were afraid of beings with silver-coloured irises.  
It made a difference. To be with other afraid people. Aliens. People.  
Rather than being alone.

In a frightening and precarious way, it was kind of nice.

"So. _Them_. Why are you so scared?" I ventured.  
A silence followed, in which they evidently wondered whether to trust me.

"The Souls insert themselves into our bodies and take our thoughts away. We are the only real Harlens left."  
"The Souls?!" I cried, so sharply they all flinched again, "I've – I've heard of them."  
The chief's four orbs suddenly glinted with something urgent.  
I noticed the side-eyes were electric blue, while the front ones were yellowish. Creepy. Like double wall-eye.

"What do you know about them?" it pressed me.  
"Well, I'm trying to find out more. Their attempt on my – partner – backfired, which is why he's sick."  
"What do you know?!"

I opened and shut my mouth for a time. Then –  
"The ship might have some records we could look at."  
"Records?"  
"Yeah. Records. Come inside, and we can have a look."

Then the solution slapped me in the face, like a light-bulb brick.  
"The ship. You could just – come with me. Away from the planet. I could drop you off somewhere…"

Even as the words were falling out of my mouth, I could see the flaws.  
Could I even plot a route to a new planet by myself? Could I find a planet suitable for them?

And what would he say when he saw them?  
What would he _do_?

The whole point of coming out here had been to warn them about _him_. Not lead them right to him.  
They also seemed to be having difficulty with the logic of my suggestion; they were shifting uncomfortably.  
"If your partner is infected, we had rather avoid him. We have spent too long preserving ourselves to take chances." the leader said, "But we need information. Will you - will you help?"

I glanced back at the TARDIS. The doors to safety.  
How easy it would be to lock them behind me… find the coordinates to a new, less populated planet.  
Or perhaps deep space. Where he couldn't hurt anyone.

I could turn tail and run, directly, with no fuss. Just run away. Return to my own problems.  
That problem of saving the universe.

Ten dead-tree faces gazed down at me with twenty pairs of eyes. Eyes that for the first time held a hint of something other than defensive terror.  
Their hope was painful to witness, knowing what I was about to do.

If _he _was really here, he would be disappointed in me.  
Mum would be disappointed in me.  
I would be disappointed. Perhaps the most.

They regarded me with all the strangeness of aliens, and all the dependence of children.  
"Of course." I nodded. "Of course I'll help. Just let me go and ask the ship what it knows. I'll be back – give me two minutes. Don't go anywhere."

I flung the doors aside as I rushed back into the ship, and left them open, so they could see me working.

Saving the universe was apparently more of a list than a single task.


	14. Surprises

I'm sorry that this chapter is also Doctor-less, but not many of them have been, and the next one certainly won't be. Hope you enjoy the alien concept though! And of course the deepening plot and all that sort of stuff. I love you reviewers, you're brilliant people, so keep me smiling and I'll keep you reading!

**14**

I skittered out of the TARDIS kicking up orange dust, flinging the doors shut behind me.  
There they were. Still waiting.  
Trusting.

What a thing, to be trusted by aliens. Thank god for the ship's translation circuit.

"We've been out in the open for too long." their chief barked as soon as I emerged. "Let's go. Now."  
I flinched and cried out as someone grabbed me – long spidery hands closing around my waist as though I were a baby – lifting me into the air where my legs thrashed uselessly.  
"Hold on." a command was thrown up to me, and in another second I was raised straight over my captor's head onto its back.

My arms coiled automatically around its neck, just in time – I suddenly felt the pull of an incredible force, the force of arms and legs moving together like an ape's, with such speed and alacrity that I was almost thrown backwards.  
And then everything started to move in fast forward. The auburn beach disappeared beneath their feet while the grey trees chased towards us, enveloping us in their limp leafless branches and thick trunks. Rotten dry vegetation crackled as we fled on and on, somehow never bumping into anything. I closed my eyes and felt myself soaring.

It occurred to me that I might never be able to find the way back on my own.  
That certainly made me open my eyes again – but by this time the trees had thinned, and I wasn't sure whether there had been any turnings I'd missed. Besides, there were bigger things to focus on.  
Like the solid wall of rock just ahead.

"Where are we?" I rasped, careful not to raise my voice. "Are we stuck?"  
"Hardly." my carrier whispered back, a smile in its voice.

Their – our – leader had dropped to its knees and was exploring the crevices of stone in the earth with its long capable fingers. Abruptly, there was a snap – a kind of crunch – and a whole section of rock just jumped up as though on a hinge. And – _light _was rising from inside the hole it had created.

My bearer turned its head on a thin extensive neck, and grinned.  
"You didn't think we would be primitive, did you?"  
"Well… you've evolved nicely." I hedged, gazing at its flaky grey skin.  
It laughed at me.  
"Three steps behind." it noted, quite fondly.

It must have been pleasant for them. To find a new non-threatening companion.  
I counted their flat heads. Nine.  
Living with eight other people in hiding for the supposed remainder of my existence. Even with best friends, I didn't think I could manage it.

Thinking about best friends wasn't pleasant, so I peered down into the pit of welcoming brightness instead, as I was gently taken from the alien's back.  
"Your den?" I asked the chief.  
"Surprisingly well equipped, isn't it?" it replied, as it ushered me to enter via the small rung ladder. "We've had years to expand. And we've been salvaging fragments of our old technologies. We were even lucky enough to pick up one of our atmosdapters. You can thank that for the lights."

"An at-what?"  
"Atmos-Dapter. Do you not have that where you come from?"  
"We have electricity."  
"How very crude. Is that what your ship runs on?"

"It's not _my _ship." I explained, trying not to squeal with excitement as I dropped into the underground room simply bursting with gadgets and fabrics and colours and panels and _things_. "It's a bioship, anyway. It absorbs its energies from all sorts. Mostly the Eye."  
"The what?"  
"The Eye of Harmony." I smirked, feeling a surge of smugness at my superior knowledge. Wherever it had come from.

"Yes. Harmony." another indistinguishable individual piped up, "Talking of that, are you going to tell us what you found? Were there records? Anything that could help us?"

I was encouraged to seat myself beside the central column, a vertical cylinder of pure light that illuminated the entire chamber, while the nine of them crowded to one corner, apparently engrossed in something that wasn't me.

"Yes – yes." I was glad that it didn't emit heat, after that burning sunlight – starlight – and the scorching fiery-coloured sands. The room's temperature was low in the way you expect caves to be.  
I found myself wishing for water, just thinking about that hot landscape and the purplish powder that lay scattered instead of an ocean.

"Do you – sorry – do you drink? Have you got any water, or…"  
"What a funny thing to ask! Of course we drink. Harla shrivelled ages ago, when the Res got too close."  
"The res?"  
"Yes, the thing in the sky that's hot."  
"Oh. We called ours the Sun."

At that point I couldn't continue trying to make conversation – their subtle activity in the corner was far too intriguing.

"Are you – what are you _doing_ to yourselves?" I cried in disgust.  
The leader's voice rang out from amongst them, "Did you really think we'd evolved to look like dead plants?"  
"Well. Perhaps." I watched them peeling, feeling my stomach wobble.

They were rubbery beneath. Still grey. But whale-grey, and sheened like a dolphin's.  
"You didn't _come _from your oceans, did you? Before they dried up?" I hazarded a guess.

"In a way. We spent most of our lives there. Our homes were very different from this."  
"Our oceans are blue."  
"Honestly?"

"What are you hiding?" another voice broke in, surprising me with its harshness.

All eyes flew to the speaker.  
"I'm not." I said, blankly.  
"You're very keen to change the subject."  
"No! It's just the first planet I've seen. It's a bit – surreal."  
"We don't have time to explain our planet history to you. We need answers."

"Now, Lin." their chief's soothing diplomatic tones overruled the tension. "If the human is curious, it's the least we can do."  
"Shall I just start?" I interrupted, hyper-aware of the repercussions a conflict like this could cause. "Do you want me to give you their background, or skip to –"  
"It's perfectly alright. Honestly. Relax. Refreshments are over that side, in the green container."

Uncertain whether to make straight for it or hold back, uncertain of whom it was most important to be polite to, I sort of sidled and edged and dawdled my way towards the targeted box as slowly as possible.  
The leader watched my progress with one side-eye, an amused expression playing around its wide mouth.

"We have all the time we care to take. It's not like we're exposed any more. You go right ahead and –"

The sentence was never finished.  
All of a sudden, every alien dropped to a crouch, their eyes turned upwards, their mouths ajar with mingled terror and apprehension and rage.

Then I heard it, too. Footsteps. Very quiet, very stealthy. But there. Definitely, heart-stoppingly.

Time fell away from us. There was no time left.  
I didn't know whether to be afraid only for them, or for my own safety above even theirs.  
… That depended on exactly whom the footsteps belonged to.

"Tell me. Tell me quickly." I heard the faintest whisper from the corner.  
I glanced over at the huddled group, their glinting frightened eyes, the raw urgency of their hunched figures.  
"_Tell me their weakness._" the chief hissed once more, yellow and blue irises boring into me all at once.  
And I wished that I had all the easy answers to give it. I wished I could help.

"I know how to detach them, once you've cut the scar open."  
My words slipped helplessly around the heavy air of the room. Our underground cage.  
They stared back at me as though waiting for more.  
"That's it." I breathed through a thick lump in my throat, "There is nothing else. The only way to stop them is to knock them out. Or kill them. Just like us. You can't leave the bodies unharmed."

The silence that dipped over us was louder than any insults or despairing cries. Their collective, accusing gaze sounded all the way through me.

Their chief's mouth was poised, open, about to retort or condemn or plead. I couldn't guess which.  
But the unspoken words remained a secret forever. A secret I would always be running from. A secret which still makes me shiver sometimes, even on the brightest of days.

For at that moment there was a crash like the thunder of angry gods, an almighty clap that seemed to rip through my very flesh like bolts of electricity.

The crack of rock above our heads being split.


	15. Ambush

**15**

They all leapt back, hissing and yelping, as the ceiling cracked open. Fragments of rock and dirt rained down.  
I squinted against the sudden burst of light and the gathering dust.  
Something metallic was poking through that crack.  
Right at the very top.  
A drill?

A voice threw words at me from across the room. "Get away! Get down!"

I watched as the cylinder of light that I'd been inspecting splintered right down the middle, under the weight of whatever awful thing was digging us out like rats. Suddenly the voice made sense. I ought to duck, or at least get away from the centre. The cracks in the roof were elongating, stretching out fingers of sky where the rock was just seconds ago. It was going to cave in.

I scrambled backwards an instant before it did, my limbs hardly useful. As though someone had sucked the very life from them. All of their strength had rushed to my violent heartbeat and gasping lungs.

A chunk the size of my body – bigger – crunched to the ground and split, flinging thick powder up like a sandstorm.

Something struck my back. I turned.  
The green box, the supply box. Big enough to offer shelter. For now.  
I threw myself behind it just as the second crash hit my ears. The light tumbling in from above betrayed us, cutting through the dust like white blades. No escape.

Escape from whom, though?

I didn't have to wait long for an answer. Turning my face upwards I caught a snatch of that drill – not so much a drill as a giant pickaxe – and what it was attached to. My jaw dropped in awe despite myself.  
It was a crane. A _hovering _crane. Or not so much a crane as a tractor. _A_ _hovering tractor_.

No wonder we hadn't heard it coming.

The chief's low mutter. "We have to make a run for it. Scatter –"  
"Too late."

Sure enough, the gaping hole in our ceiling was abruptly lined with silhouettes.  
Armed silhouettes.

One thing was clear. I definitely had to worry about myself as much as any of these guys.  
I would take a psychopathic Time Lord over this any day.

Things blurred after that. One of us tried to break out anyway, streaking for the real exit. A dart went straight into their shoulder, and they tumbled. Out flat.  
Then all chaos broke loose.

I crouched behind that box and held my breath as shrieks and thuds echoed hollowly over me like noises from a nightmare. The rock bounced their cries backwards and forwards. Surreal.

And somewhere in the midst, things intensified. Unfolded like cloth and twisted in the wrong directions.  
I couldn't see straight. Couldn't hear sharp. My head wobbled.  
I glanced down, and slowly pulled the small, brightly coloured tranquiliser from where it sat lodged into my calf.  
A rogue missile. Lucky hit.

_Mom_.

The world turned to liquid, and seeped away from me gradually, inevitably. I felt sick. So sick.  
I fell gently onto my side, the cold stone of the floor like pillows against my frozen joints, the planet still spinning queasily on its axis. Not even on its axis. Just haphazardly. Randomly. Spinning.

_Mom._

I was stumbling into sleep.  
And it was okay.  
It would all be fine if I just went to sleep.

_Doctor._

I slipped, and fell…  
And went under.


	16. The Souls

Last Doctor-less chapter! Promise. In fact, the next one will be back to third person narrative, and therefore looking into the Time Lord's mind itself!  
Enjoy Sarah's solo adventures in the meantime. Sincerely, Dorian.

* * *

**16**

I woke up. And then threw up.  
I'd only just managed to turn to the side, narrowly missing my clothes. Well, the blurs of colour that I assumed were my clothes. Not all my clothes... His shirt was still baggy around my torso.  
I was wandering…

I was sick again.

I couldn't see clearly a foot past my face. The world was gauzy, colourless beyond my own self. And it kept turning, turning upwards and sideways and backwards and pushing me back down from the prop of my elbow. I lay flat and breathed for a long while. Closing my eyes did no good – I only felt like I was spinning in space. Unable to register anything but the nausea and the lurching movement of my stomach.

Until, that was, I realised that I was cold.  
Good. Something to hold onto.  
I was cold and I ached.  
Why?

The surface I lay upon was solid and freezing and even. Like a table.  
I lowered my gaze – in a roundabout way – to my side.  
A glass table. A Perspex table. Some kind of see-through table.  
A starting point. I had a feeling that this was a new place. Last time I'd been awake, I hadn't been here.

The cave.

Flat-headed aliens disguised as trees with four eyes and long arms who hid from the scary things with silver rings in an underground base near to a purple desert with orange cliffs and desperately needed my help.

The drill and the armed silhouettes. The dart in my leg.

I jolted upright, my resolve suddenly breaking through a layer of dizziness. Only one layer. But enough.  
Clinical, clean, colourless. The table was a hospital table. Or whatever they had instead of hospitals here.

And where I was, my friends would surely be too.

My fingers grasped at the edge of the slab, and I managed to roll until I felt my legs dangling over. It was a longer way down than I'd anticipated. I struck the floor with extra gravity and felt my knees crumpling under me. Sprawled on the floor, I noticed that it wasn't colourless. More a translucent grey.

I half expected to find an IV in my arm, but no such thing. Apparently they'd thought the tranquiliser was enough.  
I'd never been sedated before, but I was almost certain it wasn't supposed to feel this bad when you woke up.

_Walls. Find the walls first, then a door. Then your friends, and hopefully not the Souls._

I crawled obediently, stumbling on all fours, until I hit something with my head. There.  
Less see-through than I'd expected, but I could just discern shapes beyond. Shapes on tables, like mine.  
I was being kept in a different room?

Well, of course I was. Human.

_Now. Door._

I found three walls in total. With sharp corners. But no exit.  
Unhelpful and illogical.

I was beginning to find my feet now – metaphorically. My sight was mediocre, but there. The room was undulating more than spinning. I decided to try an upright position.

Bad idea. Bad idea.  
I retched as I plummeted back to my hands and knees. There was nothing left to vomit, but my head seemed to explode like a volley of fireworks, and my breath was choked as though someone was tightening a leash around my neck.

The perfect moment for a couple of aliens to enter.  
I heard the vibrations of low voices and a sharp high-pitched noise as some kind of device was activated on the other side of the wall. Fragmented shapes seeped along its murky surface, before an entire panel opened up out of nowhere – literally just jumped into existence – and I was no longer alone in the triangular room. Feeble, vulnerable, and very cross.

I attempted a few swearwords to convey my lack of approval at their outrageous behaviour. Whether I was slurring, or they just didn't understand because they were extra-terrestrial life forms, was hard to tell.

"Remain calm," one said in what I assumed should be a soothing tone, "you are safe."  
I expostulated that 'safe' was a rather relative word, and if they were planning to put a parasite into my head I would rather remain distinctly _un_safe, thank you very much. They exchanged glances, and I decided that I was definitely slurring.

"Let my friends go." I tried to say.  
"Remain calm, please," was the reply.  
"You will be taken through shortly," added the other.  
"NO!" I railed, and they finally understood.

"It's wearing off."  
"It is NOT wearing off! I feel like death!" I splurged.  
"Take it through."

_It _being me. At this point I resolved that it was time to take action.  
The only result of this was that one of my assaulters got kicked rather pathetically in the place where its genitals should have been, and another received a few teeth marks in its hand, before I was arrested roughly by the arms and bodily dragged from my prison.

"LIN!" I yelled the only name I knew at the bodies calmly splayed out upon those slabs. None of them responded.  
Unsurprising, when I caught sight of the tubes running into their bodies.  
Of course. They were almost twice my size. The sedatives must have worn off on them ages ago.  
I'd been knocked out with the equivalent of a horse tranquiliser.

"Remain –"  
"DO NOT tell me to remain calm!"  
"We will be using a lesser anaesthetic. You will experience minimal side effects."  
"Apart from having an ALIEN attached to my BRAIN!"  
No answer. Apparently I was still incoherent, and therefore had no rights.

"NO. _NO_!" I repeated, trying desperately to get my message across with the only word they seemed to comprehend. My struggling increased as I felt the fight flowing back into my limbs. My head still swam and lolled from side to side, my shoes skidded and squeaked. But I was kicking harder, pulling with more energy. "_NO_!"

No good. We had crossed the area in a series of confused and stilted strides, their long legs making up for my resistance. Another invisible panel was procured from the wall. Unlocked.  
The door sprang out and slid away, to reveal another table.  
An operating table.

Instruments lined the crystal clear bench beside it, gleaming with a series of malicious winks.  
A bag of pinkish fluid hung from a bar placed above, thin tubes trailing down like tendrils from a jellyfish.

I began to shout in earnest. They almost toppled as I flung myself backwards, almost flinched away as I tore at the skin I could reach with my fingernails. But lurched on. The slab reached hungrily for my body, straps dangling from its sides, aching to restrain me.

I screamed at it, but it came closer anyway.

And then it crashed against my legs and I was lifted forcibly. The cold pressed into my fronts of my thighs, my belly, my chest. Finally my cheek as they pushed me flat. The ties pinched my skin as they were jolted into place.

"Please! Listen to me!" I tried to fix my rolling gaze on the creature closest. "You're still in there! You can't let them do this to me, I'm trying to help you!"  
"Remain calm. It will be over in a moment."  
"Listen! _Listen_! You have to fight back! You _have_ to fight it!" I was going to retch again. Panic edged the sedatives with a frenzy that sent my vision into spirals. "PLEASE."

A needle pierced my forearm.  
And then the sting of a new substance invading my vein.

The spinning stopped. Instead a steady, dripping, serene stream of darkness leaking into my mind, like ink.  
Spreading like ink into water.  
I could feel my breathing and my slackening heartbeat and nothing else. I could see them, but it didn't matter. It wasn't important.

Nothing was significant except for the overwhelming relief that seeped into me slowly, like a hand against my tumbling brain.

I was going, and it was alright.  
It would be alright once I was under.

If only somebody would turn off those alarm bells in the background and let me sleep…


	17. Anti Hero

**17**

She wasn't there.

She wasn't there, and he needed her. He needed her human hands to drive away the nightmare.  
Just one dark shifting glance of her blue eyes into his soul. Casting arctic blue light. Shedding light on him, to drive away the nightmare. A word or two emerging between the cupid's bow and full lower lip, rouged and poised to speak, to soothe, to kiss. Yes, that word. That soft meaning.

_Oncoming storm? Predator? Lonely God?_ What did it all mean?  
For one split instant he had sensed some vast and tangible knowledge of himself. So vast that he was spooked.  
Not for long, however. The words simply floated, without a background, haunted with unanswerable questions.

And she wasn't there, in the cream chair or at the console or even hiding.  
He had checked every room. _Every _room.

So she was out there. And despite himself, his stomach lurched a little to think of what conditions – or creatures – she might be facing.  
He stopped in his tracks and laughed at himself. A small, vicious laugh.  
So he was the exception, was he?

He didn't want to maim or kill the girl. That put some space between him and other threats, at least.  
But something more.  
She could be captive to any other race by now. But it was different. Because she wasn't _their_ captive.

How that gave him rights over them, he didn't know. But it did.  
He just knew that he had the potential to – he – well – he just wasn't as bad as the rest of them. That was all.

He scouted out the rucksack stuffed with weaponry. Holster belts and handguns.  
Ammunition check. Reload. Spare rounds in his jacket pockets.  
He took one last perfunctory glance about the ship, and then followed her out into the unknown.

Her tracks were scattered all over the burnt orange sands. She had been out, then looped back, then gone again.  
Why?

Answers lay a few metres on. Elongated, bare prints surrounding hers. Feet _and _knuckles. Branching out in a semicircle; several of the same creatures. That was when she'd retreated. And then returned. _Why _had she returned?

He crouched to touch the tread of one of her petite, patterned soles.  
Something was tugging at the corners of his mouth.  
Something in his chest.

He realised abruptly that if he lost her – if he lost her, it would be a bad thing.  
She hadn't been cooperative. But she had been there.

A sharp twist deep within him was pushing a word to the surface. A word so familiar and so unwelcome.  
_Lonely_.  
The Lonely God. Yes, he felt that with every inch of his solitary self.

The footsteps led in a definite direction. Towards that unforgiving, lifeless forest.  
It wasn't worth thinking about just going back to the ship.  
There was no forward path, except for this.

He lost the trail as he came to a sheer face of rock. No matter. The gigantic jagged hole in the floor was clue enough.

He threw himself to its edge on his hands and knees, assessing the damage. Technology sparkled at him from all corners beneath the layers of dust. This place had been forced into. Any violent man could see it wasn't an accident.

Coloured darts littered amongst the rubble. Containing any possible substance.  
Perhaps poison.

She – his human – was nowhere in sight.  
He didn't even know her name. The thought brought bile to his mouth.  
He would, after this. He would.

And _they_ would die. Whatever they had done to her, they would pay in full for it.  
_Whatever they had done_. He found himself needing to believe that it wasn't serious. That she would survive.

A rage boiled up in him the likes of which he had never felt. Not even for himself. This pulled deeper, burned harder, shook him trembling, as he hunted down the fresh set of prints that must be there, that must lead him to their whereabouts. Blood seared hot around his limbs, lending them breathtaking power as he finally spotted the tracks and pushed off the ground into a full-tilted sprint. He had never run so fast. His feet barely seemed to touch the earth, the trees leaping out of his way by magic. He had always been indomitable, unstoppable. But now he had a purpose. Now his fury had found a heading. Now he was more than unstoppable; he was all-consuming.

The Oncoming Storm indeed.

* * *

Three tireless miles later, he arrived at a small stronghold. The nearest city's jagged outline pressed against a muddy sky devoid of clouds. This planet hadn't seen surface water for decades. They must have been living off underground supplies, recycling every drop. It made footprints visible to a ridiculous degree; the dry dusty earth betrayed every sign of a scuffing limb, even the line of a hovercraft as it breezed its way onwards.

His wrath had not diminished – rather had heightened with every pounding stride, until he could imagine himself only as a wrecking ball, a rolling surge of pure vengeful intent sucking potency from every of its own movements, a self-sustaining tempest. Armed and unfaltering.

His weakness had dissipated, and would likely never return. Not even once he had her back.  
For the first time in memory, he had purpose outside of his own need for distraction.  
Perhaps it was all he'd ever needed.

It felt familiar.

The establishment was more of a dome than a building. Vast and imposing. Only two doors set into its sides, one obviously the main entrance. Instinctively he chose to skirt around the back, unsheathing his first gun.  
The sonic screwdriver took care of the code panel, as it always did. He let himself in without a sound, though his hearts thudded against his ribs with the exertion of the chase.

It was only when he began to steal his way along the narrow slanting corridor that he met an obstacle.  
An obstacle in the shape of a life form.

* * *

Alarm bells grated at his ear. They shouldn't have done that. It only made him less forgiving.

Two figures were bent over her – a scalpel halfway down her neck. Fresh blood welling up from her, red like the fury that descended over him to clog his senses and block out any notion but the urge to kill.

They were sprawled out like dead birds, their heads opened by bullets, before the instrument had cut another hair's breadth. It clattered and lay still, glistening and defeated.

A jar of salve marked 'heal' lay unused upon the transparent bench.

He pitched towards her prone body, having to restrain himself from tearing the tube out of her arm. Glad that she couldn't feel the pain of it being extracted, gently as he could.

Glad that she couldn't read his expression.

Digging a finger immediately into the container, he smeared the miracle substance over the vein, and then her neck. Her hair had been tied up to avoid bloodstains. He found cotton dipped in antibacterial solution. Mopped her skin with it as the tissue knitted easily together, leaving only a faint scar.

Traced a thumb over the white line.  
So she was only sedated. The even rise and fall of her torso confirmed it. Suddenly his legs felt overworked, quivering, quite useless. His breath came from his open mouth like the gasps of a dying man; his cheeks felt hot.

His eyes were burning with a quick flame, an inferno of feeling. He closed them against the pain.  
He never expected the salt waters flooding in to quench it.

With a profound shock, the moisture hit his skin. The sensation of it rolling, rolling and falling from his jaw, searing on its way down. Relief so strong it had been captured by his very body and expelled, an unwanted burden.

He thrust his fingers into his hair and gripped as though to hold himself to the planet's surface. Covered his crumpling face in his palms, and inhaled with a long, low shudder that ended in a keen bewildered sob.

His groan bounced off the clear walls like a hushed confession, heard only by the dead and the sleeping.  
"I'm crying."

_Don't you know what crying means? _Her eyes thrust wide, the sheer gaping horror. The way she'd looked at him.

"I know," he uttered in an awed whisper, dropping his gaze to her profile, just visible beneath the russet curls escaping their restraints. "I forgot. How could I forget?"  
How could he have lost the capacity to fear for another life?  
To fear it so badly that for an instant he thought his heart had burst open?

They had strapped her down. So tightly that her breath was feeble.  
His belly clenched and sparked up once again. But there was nobody left to kill. Not unless you counted the unconscious ones in the next room. _It ought to be burned to the ground anyhow_ – whatever it was they were doing here, it would not continue.  
He freed her. Lifted her. And carried her to safety.

It was shockingly easy to discover flammable liquids and potential explosives in a hospital.

Once outside, her limp form upon the sand beside him, he struck up a flame just by holding a fragment of glass to the sunlight, directing its ray at the end of his combustible breadcrumb trail. The flames leapt off down the corridor like playful children.  
He had reached a hundred metres distance when the bursts of fire and rubble began.

Her wayward hair he had untied, and now it swayed over the crook of his arm in a wave of glittering shades. He cradled her head under his chin, muscles bunched tight in an effort to keep her in place. She was a tiny slim thing, but he was scrawny too.

Three miles of hot exhausting agony awaited him.

She was tender in his grip.  
He discarded his jacket after one mile, having no need for the extra ammunition any more.  
The yellow star beat down on the back of his neck and wrung sweat from his hair.  
His arms were on fire, but he didn't put her down. She was ill enough. She didn't need sunstroke too.

Those creatures were huge in comparison to her vulnerable form; the tranquilisers must have packed a big punch, or she'd have woken up by now. Twice she shifted in her slumber, and muttered something that sounded like 'mm'. But never really stirred.

What terrors had she been through?  
Had she called for him?  
Not that he had a name to be called by, either.

The sand began to burn his feet. He had gone from being vengefully enraged to uncomfortably disgruntled.

She had run away. There it was.  
She deserved this.  
She had frightened him. Exposed him.  
Even now the softness of her flesh was making his pulse pick up.

He wasn't so sure that he liked it.

Still, he found his mouth pressed to her forehead as the ship finally came into view. The urge to shape his lips into affection around her skin was overpowering, infectious.

Kicking the door open, he just managed to get her to the deck before his legs failed underneath him, and they both slid gradually, eventually, to the floor.  
He lay folded beside her for a while. Feeling the cool clear surface against his cheek. Watching his breath stir strands of her copper curls around her face, disturbing the full fringe. Silently despising and worshipping the wide shut eyes, the small undulations of her brow to her nose to her lips to her chin.

Who was she, that could make him feel? Who did she think she was?  
How did she have the right to entice him?

In a temper, he flung himself upwards and dashed down the steps to lock the front doors.  
No matter. It didn't matter.  
She was back where she belonged. _His_ toy. And she would stay that way from now on.

So vulnerable, strewn there upon the deck. Threatened only by his presence.  
The desire to protect was ebbing now that he was the only predator involved.

With a contemptuous sigh, he heaved his aching body away in search of a drink; taking advantage was no fun at all if she wasn't awake to be afraid of him, anyway. You couldn't enjoy that tension with an insensible body.  
When she did wake up, she was going to take every ounce of his redoubled fury.

He tingled at the thought of her quick timid breath, the flutter of her heart like a mouse's. Her darting blue eyes. Parted lips like bright smooth petals, tempting and touchable. The scent of her bold terror as she stood her ground, the flickering rebellious fight she still had in her fists. How he would shout, bellow her down onto her knees, lose control and lose himself in the dread that stiffened every curved contour of her slight body.

And maybe this time…

In any case – she had a lot of explaining to do.


	18. Showdown

Dear readers!  
On Spotify or YouTube or iTunes or whatever it is you have, get the song **Rose's Theme** by Murray Gold ready to play. And when the title comes up bold and centre towards the end… well, play it. It will enhance the whole experience. Don't speed through the end; let each sentence have its moment to sink in with the music. I poured my soul into this chapter so I hope you enjoy it!

* * *

**18**

As soon as I became aware of myself, the dead heavy weight of my body pulling me against a cold floor, I knew something was missing. Something important.

I struggled against the dizziness doubled by sleep and drugs. Trying to work my way out of their tangles.  
Something missing, something I'd expected to be there when I woke up. Something I'd been fighting.  
It struck me at the exact moment that I opened my eyes and suddenly had to deal with my surroundings – the repercussions and conclusions that I was now speeding towards with a roiling, quivering wrath.

I was me. Myself. The missing thing was an alien parasite that should have taken over my mind by now.  
But I was also back on the ship.  
Alone.

No – not completely alone.

As the winking lights came into focus and I tilted my head to the side, there he was. Sitting on the cream chair, in his dark trousers and skinny grey t-shirt. Jacket gone. Expression altered also.

His hands were sculpted together into a support for his chin, head tilted down to glare at me from under heavy scrunched brows, eyes glowing silver-green and alive against his pallid skin. He looked unearthly.

He looked unreadable. Unrelatable.  
Like a real alien.

For a moment our gazes criss-crossed and battled across the deck.  
Then, silent and smooth as a reptile, he arose to tower darkly over me. I watched his shoes, dusted with auburn sand, sliding towards me almost in slow motion. Controlled. Severe.

He descended to one knee. His countenance was a thundercloud hovering over mine, as I worked up the nerve to meet his stare again. The taut mouth, lips pressed together straight as a ruler's edge, thin with anger. The grooves forming around his nose in a dangerous grimace. Eyelids narrowing as he calculated my every miniscule reaction.

The hand that pushed very firmly against the surface beside my head.

I tried to breathe evenly.

For a long time we only looked unflinchingly into one another. The seconds slipped by, until I had gazed so long I thought I could see a soul, deformed and hybrid, glittering like glass shards beneath the colours of his irises, within the black foreverness of his pupils. In all that time, they did not soften once.

I wondered what he was witnessing, in my eyes. Whether he saw pity there. Or only hatred.

My voice was strong for once. Unwavering, low like a threat. "Where are they?"  
His fist boomed against the deck like a clap of tropical thunder. I braced myself against the sound, refusing to shy.

"_Dead_." he snarled, "Don't _thank_ me for saving your _life_!"  
"The last thing I would ever dois _thank _you! And don't botherto apologisefor what you've done!"  
"_Apologise_?" the ship trembled with the undying echoes of his rage, "To them?! They put you on a _slab _and _sliced you open_."  
"They were being controlled, you could have helpedthem, that was all I was trying to do!"  
"_HOW WAS I TO KNOW_?!"

I swung with all my strength against that contorted devil's expression; the eyes like pits of black fire snapped shut against the impact, the bared teeth clenched together. I watched the mane of hair falling back into place as his head swivelled to the side. Time seemed to freeze around him, in shock, mesmerised by the silence.  
Then with a lurch, it rebooted in fast forward, as though making up for the blip. My wrists were pinned against the floor and his body loomed over me, burning with redoubled fury.

"Do _not _push me." His words scorched the air.  
"_Get off me_!"  
"Why? You're mine. I can do anything."  
"I am _not a_ _toy_!"

My knee jerked upwards of its own accord, skimming past his shoulder to collide brutally with his head. He tumbled sideways away from me with a grunt, loosing my arms, and I bolted to my feet on instinct. He lay there like a wretch, just for a split second. And in that second, I decided it would be a good idea to kick him.

My foot connected with his stomach and he heaved backwards. Just like in the movies.  
He let out a groan of mixed anguish and baleful hatred.  
And I did it again.

"YOU'RE ALL WRONG," I screeched as I felt the truth of what I was doing, felt tears standing in my eyes and casting a gauzy film over the world, "YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO _SAVE _THEM. FUCKYOU - _FUCK YOU_."  
He was already recovering, rising. The panic set in.  
He was going to hurt me. He was going to hurt me back.

As he staggered to his feet I took off towards the front door, half blind, breaking into stilted sobs.  
Locked. Locked. Hysteria burst open and grabbed at me from the inside, as though I were already in his feral grasp; I fumbled with the latch, head snapping around to gape in silent terror at his approaching figure.  
It was open, I flung it aside, and –

Was faced with empty space.  
Outer space.

His claws on my arm. The weight of his muscles ripping me backwards into the ship, flying backwards, stumbling, his body twisting around my body, fingers clamping my shoulder, the grey fabric of his shirt, and then a fist.

I toppled, head exploding, the side of my face branded with white hot iron.  
The floor wasn't so hard as his hand. A positive relief.

But still I was awake. Dizzy. Agonised. But awake.  
I tripped upwards, clinging to the handrail as I nearly fell over steps. Launched myself at the smudge of dull colours in front of me, the only sensation left being bloodlust.

He wasn't expecting that.  
He blocked my first punch but took the second to his head, my fists flailing so hard I used the heel of my hand rather than my knuckles. The third struck him in the ribs.

With a howl he began to hit back.

My shoulder. His cheek. Again.  
My stomach, his chest.

He grabbed my hair and yanked me down; I swung for his belly. He yanked again, I kicked his shin. Roaring aloud, he flipped me with a jerk of his wrist and dragged me bodily by the hair, up the steps, onto the deck, against the console. Controls bit into my back.

He slapped me roughly across the face. Blood streamed in a jagged line from a cut on his cheek; knives cut into my body. His weight crushed me against the panel, hips grinding into my hips, knees braced, one hand clutching both of mine. His sharp grimace of satisfaction.

He had me.

Panting, snarling, he brought his hand slowly to my throat. Certainly. Mocking me.  
In the swiftest motion, I turned my head and bit down.

His yell was like an explosion that signalled the end of the Universe.

I leaned back – and then dived again, headbutting him with as much force as I could muster. And suddenly he was gone; he fell gradually, smoothly backwards, as trees fall. Without a sound.

His eyes still stared up at me from under half-closed lids. The lustre of hell fading and sputtering, like cooling magma. Just rocks. The heaviness and the density of two great rocks inlaid with silver, levelled upwards, straight at me. Smoking with the apocalypses of a thousand planets, the burnt worlds, so many forgotten. Some fresh in memory. His awful opaque and inchoate stare drilling billions of deaths into me.

I dropped to my knees and pinned his wrists. The tables turned. The unlikely victor.

"_How does it feel, then_?" The sounds spilled from my mouth like so many hissing demonic voices, like red anger and guttural passion. "_How does it feel, not having control_?! _How does it feel to be afraid_?"

**Rose's Theme.**

In that moment, I could only think of Kat. Kat who shouldn't have died. Kat, who I would never see again.  
The death that blasted every other death into insignificance.

So caught in misery, it took me too long to notice that he had tears on his face. Tears besides the ones that dropped from the corners of my eyes to his skin. Tears that made tracks of their own.

His words pulled tight the cords in my heart, and then sliced them straight through.

"I was afraid." Barely a choke, barely a whimper. Salt water mingled with the blood from his cut. "I looked for you but you weren't here. I needed you, but they'd taken you."

My breathing was harsh and loud against the close air. I felt the muscles of my face slackening, the creases smoothing out into a blank despair.

His eyes were not rocks, but wells. A child's eyes. I had been wrong.

"I saw them hurting you and – I lost control, I – there was nothing else to do. They _hurt_ you." The brimming emotion in his throat was too much to bear. "I killed them. I'm sorry."

My hands weren't on his wrists any more.  
I cupped his face with them. Cradled the bruising cheeks and the soft back of his head, buried in his silken hair. Couldn't avert my gaze from the parted breathless lips and the crumpled, glistening child's eyes.

His arms lifted from the floor. Fingers reaching, unsure of where to touch.  
Just reaching for me, for something to cling to.

He looked so alone.

With a breath that was half a cry I pulled him into my arms. Folded myself around him, one forearm around his back, clutching him against me. Our chins over one another's shoulders. One hand still supporting his head like a baby's, like an infant in my embrace, wrapped in my warmth and comfort.  
The warm halo of an unutterable tenderness.

I finally felt his grip around my shoulders, returning my hold with quivering limbs, cleaving to me like a child in a nightmare.

He hid his face against my collar. His lungs sounded fragile, rasping, as if they had holes in them.

"I'm afraid," he gasped. "I'm afraid."

I shushed him softly, not noticing the soft rocking motion I had begun to repeat over and over. Fingertips tracing circles in his thick silky mane. His sobs staining my shirt – _his _shirt – as they broke out jagged and painful, beaten from his body like answers to a brutal interrogation.

I held him, pressing my mouth to his forehead. Kissed the furrowed brow, as beads of hot moisture slid down my cheeks into his hair.

"I'm here," I said. "Don't be afraid. I've got you."


	19. Respite

**19**

My body stung. Where it didn't sting, it ached.  
I was woken by the arm of the Fauteuil digging into my side where I had drowsed against it. I couldn't have been asleep for long, though. I'd sat and watched him for hours, and he was still utterly unconscious in the antique four-poster bed, cradled by the soft downy pillows and thick silken duvet, smothered up to his neck in the Victorian nightshirt I had found in the elegant mahogany chest of drawers across the room.

A huge, plush old rug stretched to almost the size of the polished floorboards. A window was set impossibly in the wall, clear morning light playing behind the heavy velvet curtains. Birdsong could be heard faintly.

Was it really morning? It was night time on a trillion planets, mid-afternoon on a zillion others.  
Perhaps some planets had no time at all.  
My head was beginning to hurt – or rather, more than it already was.  
I felt the bump on my brow where I'd headbutted him.

_You're tired_, I'd told him eventually as I rocked him, vulnerable and desolate in my arms. _It will be better when you've slept. Let me put you somewhere comfy. Well don't act like you can't stand up, come on. Come on. We're safe to let her cruise, aren't we? Let's go.  
Will you stay?  
Of course I'll stay. Here, this one. The stuff you have in this place is amazing… Look, a night shirt and everything. Take those off, we'll find you new things later. After you've had a shower. Now – pull the covers back first – okay? Warm enough? Look, I'll get the chair. I'm not going anywhere._

A pause while he'd settled down – the most relaxed I'd ever seen him – eyes closing immediately as he realised how exhausted he really was, how fragile. I'd dragged up the Fauteuil and collapsed into it. Wondering how we'd gotten to this point. Too worn out to fight against it. Suddenly we were on the same side, and it was nice. An achievement. A relief. The TARDIS had chosen me, and I wasn't letting it down so far.

He had fallen away so quickly. Leaving me in the dark.  
I'd lounged, restless with insomnia, tracing the shape of his serene expression over and over. Feeling my stomach twist as his hair had slowly flopped and sunk down over his forehead, the gorgeous fluffy texture of it against the pillow, the feel of it through my fingers as I'd placed a hand on his head, so lightly, in a moment of sheer sympathy.

_Are you in there? _I'd breathed, gazing at the innocent relaxed mouth, that had so much power to injure and so much potential to do everything else besides. _If you are, I hope you're waking up. It's getting tough. Your alter ego. Though this is the best behaved he's been. I could use a hand if you wouldn't mind. Jog his memory… the right parts of it. _Throwing myself back into my seat with a sigh. _How do you make __**that **__happen? The good without the bad?... Maybe you're never coming back. Maybe he just needs to reinvent himself. Find new reasons to be good. Start again. I can show him, can't I? He'll come round eventually._

His silence was potent. It wasn't that simple, I knew. Nothing was ever that simple. And a genocidal past… all those lost friends. Family.

I didn't know why I was so very sad, when I thought of it; why the War stuck in my heart like a fragment of glass, impossible to dig out. Like a piece of eternity carved into me without belonging to me.  
I was a tree with somebody else's heartache whittled into my bark. His heartache.

Somewhere past that thought, I'd drifted off. My dreams must have been troubled, because I awoke in a temper.

As I gazed reflectively at him now, my thoughts seemed to stir him. A hand passed over his face, rubbing the sleep from his eyes instinctively; he rolled onto his side. The eyelids retreating to reveal the glinting silver-green. Lost in space for a moment, before being drawn to me, acknowledging my existence. Remembering.

His brows knit together so suddenly it looked as if they would cross, like swords.  
Apparently he wasn't a morning person either.


	20. Hunger

**20**

He stood at the centre of a circle. A circle of countless, countless creatures. From everywhere, every when.  
Rings upon rings of them spreading outwards into eternity.  
And the innermost circle all humans. Women, mostly – men, some.  
All backs to him.  
Nobody would face him. Nobody wanted to.  
And he knew why. They judged him. They judged his actions with a morality he didn't understand.  
He recognised the back of every human head that had walked away from him, willingly or no. But he could not recall their faces.  
Every natural shade, every hue imaginable. Black, blonde, brown, ginger, fiery red.  
He had let them down. In some way. All of them.  
"Help me," he said into the emptiness that swallowed his words before they could reach anybody.  
He was alone. He was the only one in the Universe.  
That singular knowledge pulled him and tore him until he couldn't bear to live in his own body.  
A light was descending upon him. A gradual, all-encasing light. It was coming for him. Soon he would be gone.  
"Help me," he cried as the light crowned his hair, setting him alight, blinding him. "Help me!"  
And then – only when his last ounce of hope had evaporated – _she_ turned, finally, to level her gaze at him. Only her.  
The light consumed him and he blazed upon a pyre, braced against the flames.  
The thought of her kept him from screaming.

Pain failed to overtake him; instead he was bathed in a pleasant warmth that shivered over his body, undulating across him, reaching every contour and corner, and for a moment he felt utterly safe. He was protected. And the light was not red like demons; it was golden and pure, a wholesome gradual hue that filled his mind and smoothed its creases. Like daylight.

Like daylight.

It was daylight, and he could feel his body emerging, feel the muscles flexing, feel the fabrics against his skin and the weight of a duvet and the air through his nostrils and his tongue dry inside his mouth and the pillow against his face.

He could feel her watching him.  
He was safe, protected, floating no longer. He was trapped again, with this body and these thoughts, these intentions.  
Hungers of every kind crept upon him like the memories that began to unfold, furtively, cruelly.

He remembered, and his cheeks stung with shame.  
Forcing his eyes open, he sensed his features reacting immediately to the chaos that spilled back into his mind. His eyebrows drew together so quickly they felt as if they would cross, like swords. Ready for any duel. Ready for anything but her pity, shining in those tremulous arctic blue eyes that peered with concern into his humiliation, waiting for him to show weakness, to reaffirm her superiority. Well, she wouldn't have it. She _didn't _have it. Even the dark bruise on her brow failed to move him. His shin hurt, his chest hurt, and parts of his face – he was likely in as much of a state as she was.

"Hello." Tucking a stray corkscrew curl of russet hair behind her ear, raking fingers through her full fringe. "Did you sleep well?"  
He didn't deign to answer.  
"I don't know about you, but I need a wash and some breakfast."

Hunger reared its head again; his stomach growled, his mind seethed, his loins grew hot.  
He didn't know which to satisfy first. She was only a lunge away… the mattress beneath him was springy, supple, the pillows crisp and puffy with feathers, the bedding spongy and sensuous. He could almost feel her wriggling limbs fighting him, her chest contracting with cries, the muffled thud as she hit the bed, her warmth and her movements under him. See the light honey tones of her skin as he ripped the shirt away once again, everything else after it, the rounded perfect parts, the absolute touchable gorgeousness. The alluring mystery of an untold body beneath the layers. Smell the fear at her throat. Taste her mouth, her flesh, as she struggled, tired, succumbed. Hear the desperate yells turning to pleasure.

He _wanted _her to enjoy it. But not before she'd satisfied his lust to conquer, to break and enslave and almost destroy.  
Two birds with one stone, as it were.

But then, quite suddenly, she was the one advancing. A hand grew in his vision, stretching towards him.  
Fingertips brushing his hair from his forehead.  
Smoothing his brows with her thumb. Trying to erase the creases of anger and violence from him.  
Large, round, magnetic blue halos tying his gaze up in hers.

"I don't suppose you know where the bathroom's got to?" The husky voice that still flowed, the low tones that still acquiesced.  
Her touch was like a heavy spell. He had to resist a sudden urge to lean into it, to croon his gratification.

His hands itched to grasp her, gently, to coax her into the covers and cocoon them both. To feel her loose, contented muscles lounging against him. Hear her soft intakes of breath as he pressed his lips dotingly to her throat, her shoulders, snaking bare arms about her and finding her bare too. His palms roving over her, slowly, with relish. Allowed.

To have her safe, locked up and safe in his tender grip, soaking in the mutual desire, the consensual satiation.  
He wanted her to want him.

Impossible.

The truth splashed about him like cold water; her only reaction would be negative. She would struggle, and never stop.  
She was afraid of him. She abhorred him. He had taken everything from her, why wouldn't she?  
He was hideous in her eyes. At best, pitiable. For now. While he bared his distress to her, while he played the weakling.

Any intimacy he wanted from her would have to be gotten by force – or trickery, and _then _force.

He tried to bring the tears to his eyes. Anything to have her hold him, to bring her a few stages closer.  
But his stomach still growled and his gut still raged for violence and his expression simply soured to a sullen mask. He couldn't do it. He couldn't feign hysteria when all he felt was an overpowering temper, impatience, discomfort. And besides that he knew as soon as he forced her, his desires would be ruined. Overpowering her was only so much fun until he began to crave acceptance; he needed her to subjugate herself, to feel her resistance waning, the protests turned to encouragement.

He realised that he cared about what she thought of him.  
Why else would he need her – not her _permission_ – but her eventual assent? Why else would he yearn for caresses as well as the addictive thrill of fighting her down? Why else would he feel a twinge of guilt just looking into her face, now, as his body relaxed and the frenzy died in him?

She observed the change. The sulky silent calm.  
"Come on, then. Get up. We can go back to hitting each other once we smell nice, on a full stomach."  
Her smirk was mocking but nervous. She wasn't sure how far she should tease him.  
It only made him fond of her.

Still, he frowned deeply as she giggled at his night shirt. "I wasn't really thinking last night. Suits you. No?... Okay."  
He clamped his jaw shut to prevent himself from snapping at her, as she led him through his own ship, in search of what she called an 'airing cupboard'. Followed her with extreme patience. Accepted the towel finally thrust at him. Let her lead him to the biggest bathroom. Eyed her darkly as she ran the taps, checking the temperature, keeping up the one-sided conversation tentatively.

"I'm guessing you know how to wash," she chucked a bottle of scented soap at him as she screwed the taps closed, "I'll be in the other bathroom. With the door locked. Just so you know."

And then she was gone. And he _did _want to bathe in the perfectly heated water, and rub lather over his skin and through his hair.  
And he did feel better. Lighter. The warmth loosened his aching muscles. He felt more physically appealing.

He dried himself with the dazed air of a man going through motions he was only just remembering. The particular way he was used to rubbing the towel. How he handled his wet hair.

There was a knock at the door.  
"Are you covered up?"

He tied the fabric around his hips and answered affirmative.  
She poked her head in, and he watched her expression jumping through several different phases. Some she seemed to be covering with others. Eventually she snickered, eyes darting to and from his torso, eventually fixing on his face.

Indignation stirred in his belly. She was laughing at his appearance.  
Only pushing him further from his objective.

Her hair was damp, like his. But she was dressed in new clothes.  
"I found the costume department again," she announced proudly, showing off the white puff-sleeved blouse, the black jeans, the long brown boots. "I feel like Hans Solo. Very retro-space-pirate."  
He didn't encourage her with a reply.

"Do you own a hairdryer?"  
He shrugged.  
"Right. I'll probably be dry by the time I actually find one… See that razor over there, by the mirror? You might want to use it. On your face. Get rid of the stubble. I'll go get you some – some outfits to try. I'll leave them outside for you. Meet you on deck when you're done."

Gone again. Beginning to irritate him. Prancing around the ship like she owned the place.  
With a huff, he attacked the mop on top of his head with the towel again, his eyes drawn to the razor at the sink.

Whatever was happening to them – to him – it disturbed him deeply.  
He didn't know whether to explode into fits or to surrender himself entirely to her motherly, mocking ways.

At any rate, he wouldn't decide anything until he had satisfied his stronger need for food.


	21. Learning Curve

****When the bold lettering indicates, play '**This Is Gallifrey: ****Our Childhood. **Our Home.' by Murray Gold, starting from **one minute in exactly.**

Thankingyou! Enjoy this chapter, I really enjoyed writing it. I also really really enjoy reviews!

**21**

"I was hoping you'd choose that one," she eyed his outfit with approval as he emerged at the corridor's entrance. At least she wasn't laughing at him any more. His stomach rumbled. The telepathic fabricator was awaiting him eagerly on deck; it looked as eager to procure food as he felt to consume some. He made a dash for it, hitting its receptor rather hard with his palm and ending up with three bars at once, none of which had a flavour that made sense. Two of the three tasted savoury _and _sweet. Surprising. Nice.

I watched him wolf everything down and then thrust his hand to the machine again.  
Three bars of my own sat in my lap. Hot Weetabix. Pancake with lemon and sugar. Apple. I munched on a fourth – honey nut cornflake – and congratulated myself on my good judgement of fashion. Vintage suited him well. The dark drainpipe jeans, battered brown brogue boots, baggy knitwear jumper sporting all kinds of autumnal colours, sleeves falling just over his hands. It brought out the natural boyishness of his features, the lovely hues of his hair. Made him look so lovable.

Practically inhaling the bars, he looked like a starved teen, hung over after a crazy night.  
It was half-true. Last night was a night to remember. Just not out loud.

And now – now what? What else could I do but keep this up? He wasn't reacting with the utmost pleasure I had hoped for. No gratitude, no affection, no niceness. But he wasn't slapping me around, either. And he wasn't exactly displeased with everything I did for him. A part of me suspected that he was secretly enjoying this charade. That all he really wanted was a bit of mothering.

It was so easy to fall into nonchalance. To get sloppy. To forget the monster that still broiled beneath the surface.

He asked the machine for drink. Two glasses.  
Then he meandered over, never looking directly at me, and sat himself on the floor beside the cream chair I perched in. Handed up one of the cups.

"Thanks," I managed through my surprise, bringing it to my mouth. It wasn't water. It wasn't really any kind of drink I'd had before.  
It was an amalgamation of confused flavours. Telepathically puzzled over by his urgent, thirsty mind.  
"It's kind of like drinking your thoughts."  
"I'd pity you if you had to taste those," he spat in reply.

A silence while I drank, fascinated, and thought I detected bitterness in the mix.

"When we fought," his voice floated up to me, and I flinched as though it were a fist. "You told me I was all wrong."  
"I was angry. I said things I didn't mean."  
"You said I should have saved them."  
"Well, that's what I would have done."  
"But _why_?" he glanced up with suddenly tremulous eyes, real anguish of confusion on his face.

"Because that's the right thing to do."  
"Right?"  
"Well, would you hurt me now?" I asked, hoping to god he wasn't going to give the wrong answer.  
"Not right now."

Close enough.

"And why not?"  
He squirmed a little in the baggy jumper, like a child singled out in class.  
"Because I don't want to."  
"Yes?"  
"Because you make me feel safe. And not alone."

I wasn't prepared for the way that would touch me. Reaching out unconsciously, I lay a hand on the back of his head.  
"I'm glad I make you feel that way. That's sort of what I'm aiming for."  
"But why is it? Why do you want to – to do right for me – when I've done nothing right for you?"

Tough question. With answers that should be avoided in case they triggered any vestiges of memory.  
The last thing I wanted on my hands right now was a self-discovering Time Lord tormented by the past. Hopefully not ever.  
Last night's one-way conversation with his sleeping form came back to me.

_How do you make __**that **__happen? The good without the bad?... Maybe you're never coming back. Maybe he just needs to reinvent himself. Find new reasons to be good. Start again. I can show him, can't I? He'll come round eventually._

"Because – look at where it's got you," I hedged, "you're almost behaving like a normal guy. That wouldn't have happened if I'd just railed against you forever. I used to be terrified of you – _used to _isn't quite accurate, but – I dunno. I guess I just saw it in you. The kind of man you could be if we communicated properly."  
"I don't feel like any kind of man," his eyes grew darker and yet seemed to flash. "I feel like – like something that's swelling up. Something horrible. A predator. A storm. I don't know how to – I just know that the hunger is there. Always."  
"Well, I'm here to see if you can channel it. I mean – you saved me – and thank you – and I know you killed people while you were doing it, but didn't that feel better than killing? The thought that you were rescuing me?"

He jerked away quite suddenly. "How did you know that?"  
"Because that's how all good people feel. They want to be rescuers."  
"Is that why you're here?"  
"No. I'm here because you kidnapped me," I said bluntly, "But I am _staying _because I want to help you, yes."  
"You're _staying _because I won't _let _you leave," he hissed, sending a minute chill up my spine.

"Well, that's what you think."  
"It's what I _say_. And what I say happens."  
"Are you afraid to lose me?" I interrupted, forcing myself to be still, to be calm.  
He snapped his head to the side.  
"Of course I am. I told you I am. You're the only thing that makes sense. You're the only thing that's real."

"Then don't you think," I pressed, "That making me want to stay would be better than threatening me?"  
He paused to consider this.  
"The difference is that I'm doing 'right' – for you as well as me?"  
"Yeah. That. And that would make you a good person. Don't you think?"  
"I suppose so."  
"Now, apply that to those Harlens you killed back there."

He tensed immediately, baring his teeth in a way that made me feel strangely fond of him.  
"No. Listen. I told you they were being controlled."  
"They hurt you. Nobody hurts you but me."  
"Well, that's not logic, for a start. But if they were being controlled then it wasn't their fault, was it?"  
"Fault," he mused to himself.  
"They weren't being cruel on purpose. If they weren't being controlled they would have been good."

"How were they being controlled?" he questioned, genuinely hooked.  
I sighed, and shifted. "How much do you remember about – when you first woke up?"  
A light shudder passed through him and I almost panicked.  
"Strange things with weapons. Bearing down on me. I remember –" he twitched, eyes flickering. "I remember – a fight. In my head. Something happened in my head. Something awful. Like there were two things – battling for my mind."

Now I panicked. "So," I garbled to distract him, "so imagine that something won _their _minds. And made them different."  
"I was right," he murmured, speaking only to himself now. "I wasn't born there. I was someone. Before."

"Stop." I flung myself from the chair to kneel in front of him, clasping his head in both of my hands. "Stop. You'll only hurt yourself."  
"It tried to take me," he bored straight through me into some vast, dark, unknown place. My heart boomed in my ears, my chest was tight. "I must have fought back. I must have. Otherwise I would be _it_. I wouldn't be so lost. I wouldn't."

I gazed quite helplessly at his breathtaking wondrous expression, the soft 'o's of his open mouth and his round eyes.

"It tried to take me but it couldn't," he gasped, cresting towards his own doom. "It couldn't take me and I couldn't stop it."  
The silence echoed the truth of his words.  
This was it, I thought, resisting the urge to clutch him to me. This was where I lost him to grief. Rage. Doom. Who knew what.

But his brow crumpled, and his lips drew together into a worried line.  
"Is that why – I exist?"  
The whisper was heart breaking. The sound of a fractured soul recognising its reflection. Coming to terms with its own corruption.  
"Is that why I can't control – it – myself – is that why I can't remember? Is that why I'm so _angry_? Why I'm afraid?"  
Tears stood in the silver-flecked halos of forest green.  
"That's what I feel. Every waking moment. That's it. The eye of the storm."

_Yes,_ I thought miserably, wanting to kiss the beads of water from his cheeks. _The battle within that makes you so violent. And I don't know how to fix it. I can't stop it without killing your soul anyway._

He suddenly realised that I was still in existence. His hands shot out and gripped my upper arms with shocking strength.  
"You have to help me," his tone urgent, low, fierce, demanding. "You have to help me find out who I was."  
I nodded, trying to keep my expression blank, trying not to fall apart in his grip.  
How, how, how? How was this all so impossible and unfair?  
"You'll help me," he repeated, reassuring himself, as he rose to his feet, not knowing what he wanted or where he was going. Just beginning to pace about the deck like some wild thing. "You'll help me and when I remember, I can chase this other thing away."

His feet appeared and disappeared in my line of vision. I couldn't seem to stand.  
The motherly bossiness was gone from me. All of that pretence was over. I was weak with fear.

How could I protect him now?

Even as the thought struck me with a crippling blow, his brogue boots struck the floor beside me.  
"This is my ship," he said. "This is the only thing I remembered when I woke up."  
I stiffened, sensing how close he was to danger.  
I had to do something.  
I had to do _something_.

******This Is Gallifrey: ****Our Childhood. **Our Home. (1:00)

"If she can work to help you then she will work to help me. She brought you to me. Kept you safe so you could do everything you've done. Doesn't it make sense?"  
His eyes were warming, thawing, lighting up like the dawn of spring.  
"Some kind of records – records of my travels, of my time in here. Who I was. Like a log or an interface or –"  
"Voice interface enabled."

My eyes almost bulged out of their sockets, and suddenly I was on my feet.  
He was looking at the hologram replica of himself. Drinking in the tweed, the bow tie. His eyebrows were stretched far into his forehead.

"Look," he said aloud in awe, "that's me. That's her, making me. Is that what I used to wear?"  
My thoughts chased each other around fruitlessly.  
And then fell headlong into an impulse.  
A stupid, reckless, awful impulse. An impulse I'd been fighting since the day I was kidnapped.  
But the only impulse I had to hand.

Every nerve, every inch of skin, every limb, every muscle of my body vibrated and flooded as I swayed slightly onto the balls of my feet. Time stretched itself out before me, the seconds lagging into hours as I waited to snap, I waited for the courage.

"Computer," his voice like silken astonishment and anticipation, his back to me as he gazed into his own silver-free eyes. "Tell me who I am. Tell me what I've done. Tell me my name. Tell me everything."

My hand was on his shoulder. Jerking it, twisting his body in the air. Clasping his neck between my palms, sliding upwards into his hair, thumbs soft over his jaw.

I kissed him.


	22. The Kiss

Song today: **Beauty Killed the Beast V**, by **James Newton Howard **from the **King Kong **soundtrack. The music starts at the beginning of the chapter, so get playing now!

**22**

The taste of his shock on my mouth, more delicious than anything I would have expected or imagined. Lips suspended in Time. Cold crackling volts of fear and astonishment running, chasing from him into me, like white wine into a glass; plummeting crystal and vivid sweetness and soft yellow light. All of these things seemed to strike at once, like a great wave against the unsuspecting cliff. His face crashing close to mine just like a wave. I clung to him as my knees trembled beneath me, clung to his shoulder, his neck.

I was transported beyond myself. I was barely human, quivering in light and air and Space.  
He was unlocking me slowly like an ancient combination. Delving. Creaking doors ajar that had never been opened before.

Our lips hadn't even moved; pressed exactly as they had been on first contact. Uncertain. Anxious.

I was half-aware of myself, as one in a dream, just registering his rigid body beneath my grip, and the arms still at his sides. I opened my eyes tentatively, peeking up at him from the shelter of my fringe like a trespasser from the undergrowth. The silvery shapes dazzled me. The black infinity beyond his green irises was like the shadow in a dense jungle, the heart of a great darkness. And it was looking into my very core. The murky depths of his nature invading me, seeking me. I stared back beyond the silver Soul, into the real spirit that dwelt there. It was terrifying, fascinating, like leaning out over a hundred foot well with no lights at the bottom. The whole of eternity was there, in his eyes, like two hidden clocks. Just a shifting glance, just a closer look, and there they were. The truth of everything.

The sound of surprise and pleasure that escaped my throat as he finally lifted his arms around me was genuine, sudden, as though my soul had spoken aloud. A hand slid up my back, stiff and supportive, while the other swept my hair up into his fingers, clasping the back of my neck in swift, sheer alacrity. The breath rushed to our lungs at the same instant, a great giddy gasp before my lips were snatched in his own again, the blood surging to my light head, his mouth moving hungrily, commanding me – and I flowed along with him like the female half of a dance, letting him lead, letting him mould me to his wish.

The doors that had creaked now snapped wide open, the unknown recesses emerged to float and undulate like every-coloured splashes of ribbon. The secrets of my life unwinding like filmstrips. I could sense them, but I couldn't read their faces; even exposed they retained their mysteries.

But he was still there, almost calling to receive me, and with the faintest will I felt myself pouring into his mind. Filling him, surrounding him like warm water, feeling him relax against my intrusion.

I was in the midst of his past, his present. His memories and thoughts and sensations and emotions. Everything. As they flitted obscurely I began to discern vague meanings, things buried that he himself would not remember. Things I only knew from what I'd been told.

The Time War like a gathered storm cloud, at the centre of all things, brooding with dark hues and flashes of horror. The essences of people he'd touched, who had touched him. Like ghosts. Alien phantoms muttering revenge.

And for the first time, I felt the almighty fissure running down the structures of his mind. The point at which his identity had been taken. It stung and writhed like a live thing, coated in venom. I reached for it thoughtfully, as though I could perhaps soothe it with a touch.

His fingers dug into my skin. His teeth grazed around my lower lip, his kisses becoming violent, desperate.

The wound twitched away from me, seething, too sensitive. I could feel the other being, the Soul, grappling for control. _It's alright_, I tried, extending an invisible hand, _I'll make it alright._

A bolt of searing agony rent me.

I sank in his arms, bewildered, alone, terrified and angry. So angry I could rip a world apart.  
He hissed under my ferocious pinching grip, my nails leaving marks.  
I was an inferno embodied. Alone. Alone and unloved. No context, no past. Only confusion and hatred and hunger. Needing to run.  
Needing to hurt, to see hurt in others, to make them understand.

I broke from him as he held me upright. Our breath crashed together in the closeness, eyes half-opened to share in the moment of relief, to make sure reality was still there, that there was still a floor beneath our feet, that our bodies had not been torn from us in the battle for our souls.

I reached up. Cradled his head against my shoulder. Caressed his forehead with my lips and stroked the silky hair.  
"Are you alright?"  
"There was something in you," he murmured, voice blank with shock, "something – I don't know. I tried to read it. It wouldn't let me. I could just feel it shying away from me. It was like – I feel like I _know _you."

"I had the same."  
He jerked out of my embrace suddenly, eyes wide.  
"You did? What did you see? Was there anything – any clues, any memories?"  
"It was muddled," I said truthfully. "But I saw – the moment you were changed. Like a fracture. I felt like I wanted to kill something... It was terrible."

He gazed at me with a new intensity.  
"You understand," he asked and implied all at once. "You know what I went through? What I _go_ through?"

I nodded. And then remembered the danger of the voice interface lurking behind him still.

"I couldn't see your past but I could feel it."  
"What was it? Bad?"

I smiled as though still tasting the sweetness of it. Trying to erase aeons of pain with just one lie.  
"It was beautiful. You were beautiful. You were _good_."  
"What happened to me? In that life?"  
"Adventures. You went on adventures and made things right, in every corner of the universe."

His expression was incandescent.  
"Really? Honestly?"  
"You did right by everyone." I smirked a little, conspirational. "Humans were your favourites."  
"Yes. Yes, it all makes sense now."

He kissed me again, purely, gently. Warmth kindled between my ribs.  
I took a chance and peeked over his shoulder. The interface was gone. It was safe. For now.

"You know," I held his fingertips to my mouth one by one, "I found the loveliest place, my first time here. A picnic under the stars. I've never had the chance to enjoy it."  
"It sounds peaceful."  
"It is." I drew him in, tempting and teasing his lips, trailing little kisses down his jaw to the path of the vein in his throat.  
His voice was husky with lust. "Take me, then."

His hand was in my hand. I led him away, my heart palpitating, not knowing what would happen next, or how. Just why.  
To postpone his doom.


	23. The Blanket

This chapter isn't explicit, but it isn't for young teens either. If you're under 16 you have been warned.  
Enjoy this brief moment of actual serenity for the Doctor and Sarah, because it won't last long!  
Thank you to DH Lawrence, whose prose I have stolen quite a lot of, at the beginning of the Doctor's inner monologue.

**23**

"Tea?"  
I nodded and propped myself up.  
"There are two flasks," he inspected them as he said so, I heard his quiet intake of breath.  
"What?"  
"She's labelled them."

His eyes darted to me with a new intensity, and I felt my stomach plummet.  
"Doctor," he echoed. "And…" he glanced as though to double check, "Sarah."

A wave of crackling, tingling sensation hurried through my every nerve, rushing up my spine to make me tremble. My name in his mouth. At last.

"I told myself," he muttered, "when I saved you – I would ask your name. I forgot."  
"It was a busy day," trying to keep the tone light, I took the cup of tea from him.

We drank, bodies mirrored across the blanket, gazes fused together in the slow calm pulse of the night above us.

I finished quickly before I could spill it down myself – his eyes were _very _distracting – and turned to the open basket again. "Strawberries?"  
"What are they like?"  
"Nice," I held one out to him, intending him to take it in his hand.  
He apparently decided to cut out the middle man, craning his neck towards me to take the fruit in his mouth. I pulled away instinctively, and he smiled - chuckled - took it as a game. _Oh no. Oh no oh no. This is too cliché. _And yet my free hand was holding down both of his lightly, playfully, and I was teasing him still. He laughed aloud as he thrust his head forward and nearly dropped his tea all down me.

I laughed too, but not too much. My abductor, my jailor – literally eating from my hands? Was this all it really took to dispel the monster?  
I had felt his rage myself. I knew the overwhelming emotions that rattled through him like wind through an empty shell. And yet – acceptance. There was the crux of it. I had felt all of the self-doubt, the pain of rejection, the bitterness of my lashing fists in the brawls we'd had. The surprise, the relish with which he received my affection. He destroyed things because he was afraid they wouldn't love him – I was still alive because the TARDIS had sheltered me, because he'd recognised her attachment.

I had forgotten to keep teasing, and his teeth were sinking into the fruit, tearing its sweet pink flesh at the stalk. I had always thought strawberries were an incredibly overrated means of foreplay. But now – my skin was alive with sensation, just watching that mouth, feeling his lips against my fingertip as he closed his jaw around the fruit and it disappeared, consumed, surrendered.

I needed air.

Rolling onto my back, I drank in the serene scope of the sky, the lanterns swaying gently in the tree, all colours, soft and inviting, the moonlight dappled through sparse leaves and illuminating my white shirt.

And then my chest seemed to kindle into an ecstasy of nerves, as his silhouette appeared above me. Leaning over. So close.

His gentle breath stirred my hair around me, drenched my lungs with the scent of strawberries.  
"Sarah," he murmured.

With a faltering glance, he dipped his head.

The deep giddy breath I snatched as his mouth closed warm over mine was like inhaling life itself. The purity, the pleasure, swelling the frenzy of my need for him, every motion of his lips enhanced, concentrated, transformed into sheer gratification of feeling. His consciousness encased itself around my own as he merged us together in that sheer dark world outside of Time and Space, between and within only us. At times I was so engaged in the mental thrill of my discoveries, filtering through his thoughts, his feelings, that I barely noticed how our garments fell away.

At the first explosive, carnal shock of raging bliss, the astonishment pulled us clear of our souls, and gasping as one we opened our eyes.

"You're beautiful," he said blankly, his body black like a shadow against the moon and lantern light.

Heart throwing itself against my ribs, I beckoned him in to kiss me again. I wanted to relish every ounce of his joy and relief at finally being taken in, recognised, known and loved to the very core; it deepened the soaring, visceral ascent of my ecstasy, tipping me…

* * *

It was so sweet and satisfying, lying there aimlessly with her.

The afterglow seemed to form a kind of sheen around them, separate from the moon and the stars and the lamps. He marvelled, and held her hand first to one heart, then the other. Her voice was a low husky breeze disturbing his hair, caressing his cheek; her cool pale body was the moon itself, and he sheltered it with his own sustaining heat. The sky was jealous.

One day he was a monster, living with the ever-expanding loneliness of the Universe.

The next day he was with her, as remote from the Cosmos as if the two of them were buried like a seed in darkness. He was shed naked and glistening onto a soft, fertile earth, leaving behind him the hard rind of his past experiences and pains. He pulled the blanket around the both of them as she shivered in his arm. Inside, in the softness and stillness of this fabric, guarded by the glowing tree, was the kernel that palpitated in silent activity, absorbed in reality. Her reality.

As they lay intertwined, complete and beyond the touch of Time or change, it was as if they were at the very centre of all the slow wheeling of Space… For this moment they were at the heart of eternity, whilst Time roared far off, forever far off, towards the rim. He wanted it never to end.

It was the greatest relief of his life when her breathing lengthened, deepened, and she dozed softly against him though they had only been a few hours awake. He would drift, too. When he had drunk enough of this moment to feel, at last, like the cracks were beginning to heal over.

Her russet curls were soft to touch as he brushed them away, to see her better. The heart shape of her face, wide-set eyes large even when closed... The lashes seemed to flutter as her eyes wandered beneath the lids... What was she seeing? What fragments of old life did she think of, in that hazy space between blissful awareness and sleep? What was her life, really? He wanted to know it. He wanted her to take him there. To introduce him to the people she loved. The people he hadn't killed, at least.

He thought hard about how to go back and rescue the girl - _Kat_, was it? What a way to impress her. What a way to make up for all the wrongs.

But he knew it was impossible. If Kat didn't die, Sarah - it still sounded odd, her having a name - Sarah wouldn't have jumped for him, would never have entered the ship, wouldn't have had those arguments, those fights, that had led to this moment. This state of being.

Being _good_.

If this was what being _good _resulted in, he'd do it every day.  
He wondered idly if she missed it. Her home, her people. He apparently had nothing to grieve for. Sarah would have seen it in his mind, told him.  
He was an outsider, a one-of-a-kind, a nomad. She was all he had. And that was why she could never go home.  
The violent pleasure of it roused him from his stupor. Still the thought of subjecting her was a tasteful one, and suddenly her unconscious body was so vulnerable to his every whim; her complacency made her his prisoner, and if he wanted to throttle her now there was nothing in the Universe to stop him.

But he wouldn't.  
He wanted her here, alive and hot and thinking, argumentative, rash.  
He wanted her here, understanding and compelling and comforting.

And... he wanted her to be happy. When she was happy, his Universe seemed to flow a little easier. He felt a great ease of spirit, a carefree euphoria unmatched by any other experience. Like now.

He leaned in to place a doting kiss on the full fringe, the head that rested tenderly on the blanket beside him, her neck curved, perfectly fitting, over his arm.  
The lashes spread like a tiny bird's wings. The corners of her mouth drew upwards as their stares tangled.  
"What are you thinking?" she murmured, with only the most delicate undertone of anxiety.  
Her concern made him squeeze her a little more tightly in fondness.  
"Nothing at all, really."

"Do you want to go and see some sights?" her wide blue eyes began to shimmer with a kind of lust that wasn't meant for him. It was infectious.  
It was the look of somebody who was off to see the Universe - without any thought of enslaving or destroying.  
And it intrigued him.

"If you'd like to. I'd like to."

She put her soft rosy lips to his once, as though drinking from the sweet torrents of energy flowing between them. The spark that was neither him nor herself, but an entity caused by their union, intangible, only pulsing through the kiss like a river.

And just like that, they were off - on one of those mysterious, half-remembered things she called an 'adventure'.


	24. Skaro

**24**

"Anywhere?" he repeated.  
"Yes, anywhere! Can I drive?"  
"Can you what?"  
"Please?" she grinned.  
"You can't fly her! You don't know how."  
"Don't I?"

Sarah pulled the engine release lever and rushed around to the space-time throttle. The TARDIS roared to life with pleasure.  
The Doctor – yes, it really was his name – peered at her curiously.

"You do know how to drive. Why do _you_ know?"  
"Well, you were having a bad day and I needed to park her somewhere."  
"Right after which you got yourself into trouble."

She took his hand as she darted to the spatial location input, and kissed him impishly.  
"We know that won't happen again."  
He gave in, folding his arms around her and dipping once again into that secret world that cut them off from the rest of the Cosmos. She was impossible. How could he go on every minute for the rest of his existence _not_ tangled up on that blanket with her?

"Type some co-ordinates, then." Her fingers, soft and slim like a pickpocket's, guided his to the keyboard.  
"Why me?"  
"Your TARDIS," she shrugged. "The last time you plotted randomly it led you to me, didn't it."  
He smiled against her mouth. "I suppose so."

He finished with a flourish. Somehow he felt that he had always done this part with a _flourish _before. He had been lively, active, always positive, always so excited. Sarah was right – he had soared across the stars doing right by everyone, and he had loved it.

He also had the feeling that rides were usually a bit more bumpy than this. Sarah flew her with panache, but she did everything right. She even used the atom accelerator and inertial dampers. Hadn't he always done a couple of things wrong – on purpose or otherwise – to get that extra kick? Falling about on board was a lot more fun than this. With two of them there wasn't even that much running.

"This is a bit tame, isn't it?" he remarked.  
He'd spoken too soon.

Abruptly the ship lurched, plummeted, lurched again. Sarah clung for dear life to the panel and flung herself at the gyroscopic stabiliser. It didn't do all that much good – the TARDIS bucked and reared like a bronco, and the Doctor really was falling about on board, and even down the steps. He yelled her name as he grabbed the bannister, feet dangling.

"SHE'S NOT HAPPY!" Sarah yelled back over the awful, grinding, screeching hullabaloo that ripped from the ship's heart.  
She struggled with the stabiliser again, to no avail.

"CHANGE THE COORDINATES!" he advised, almost with glee. _This _was travelling in style and no mistake.  
Sarah obviously couldn't reach, and didn't have the foot or handholds to climb. The ship was virtually horizontal.  
"SHE'S PANICKING! SHE'S LOST CONTROL! I THINK SHE TRIED TO FIGHT IT TOO HARD!"

Sarah was right. In his fond recollections of gambolling about the deck he didn't remember these sounds, this pressure that suddenly filled the cabin.

A burst of light erupted at the base of the column, beneath the deck. Fire.  
"SARAH!" he bellowed again. "THE COOLING SYSTEMS!"

The TARDIS spun and tumbled. Taking advantage of the tilting floor he yanked his jumper off over his head and threw himself towards the small blaze. Above him Sarah's quick feet carried her around the helm, and as he slid sacrificed his clothing to pat out the flames she slammed down the appropriate lever, only just reaching before the ship bucked in the opposite direction again.

"TRY THE BRAKES!"  
No good. He clung to the column and watched helplessly as she tried to grab onto something that wasn't the wrong lever, failed, and fell backwards as the ship sloped. She was caught by the cream chair.

They were close, very close, and almost certain to crash land. He heard Sarah cursing at the top of her lungs. She could sense it too.

Just once, more, the TARDIS gave a heave and slanted wildly. Sarah braced herself against the chair, and then leapt just as the cloister bell began to scream – grasped the helm – rotated the harmonic generator – pulled at the time rotor brakes – and adjusted the zig-zag plotter at the same instant that she slammed down the red materialisation lever.

With a gasp and a crunching sound, the ship righted itself, and landed.

"WHAT was that?" she choked, as she crumpled on the deck, wheezing for air.  
"Was it my co-ordinates?"

He scrambled back up the steps to clasp her to his chest and kiss her head, filled with pride. She had saved him, again.

"Whatever it is, I think we should leave."  
"What? With her in this state?"  
"I'd rather risk it." Sarah eyed the doors to the outside world with suspicion. "I have a bad feeling."  
"But we've only just gotten here. I thought you wanted to see some sights?"

She only shivered against his torso.  
He followed the line of her gaze and also felt a kind of tremor running up his spine as the doors gripped his attention. Something seemed to lurk behind them, waiting, ominously and patiently. It beckoned with a call that both chilled and fascinated him.

"We ought to look," he argued quietly. "Maybe there's someone who needs our help."  
"Doctor please, I don't want to. We shouldn't."

With all her purity of soul she shied away from that invisible thing. But he – he couldn't deny that within him was a foul darkness, a response to the awful summons. He wanted to know. He needed to know. The monster in him whispered.

Slowly, stiffly, he stood and stretched out the bruises from the flight.  
Then he strode sedately, as though under some influence, and with a steady hand unlocked the doors and pulled them open.

The dull red light struck him first, struck home to his very hearts and boiled his blood till it seethed. Gradually, eyes adjusting to the glare, he took in the landscape of dead jungles and long-abandoned cities. He regarded the towering monument, like a looming nightmare, the worst imaginable, watching over everything.

It was a silhouette that had haunted him day and night for his entire existence, whether he'd known it or not.  
It was a shape burned into his memory forever.

The sight of it, that one image, was all it took to turn the entire Universe into one searing inferno of hot fury.

He remembered.  
He remembered the Time War, and all that came before it. He remembered the cold blue light from those eye stalks and the flash of their lethal ray guns. He remembered their fleets, their millions of ships, their endless battle for conquest. He remembered their hatred, their intense hatred for all things, their _worship _of hatred.

_You think hatred is beautiful_, he had spat at their Prime Minister.  
_Perhaps that is why we have never been able to kill __**you**__…_

* * *

I watched him silhouetted against that red sky, his outline almost matched to the colossal statue that he was staring at, rooted to the spot with one hand gripping the door frame so hard I thought it might splinter. Through the t-shirt I could see every muscle of his back taut to the point of pain. His shoulders were hunched and strained, the veins showing in his arms.

He turned to look at me, and the silver blotches in his eyes were lurid. I hadn't seen such an expression in them since - since he had last destroyed an entire planet. The beast raged even on the surface. His jaw was clenched, though his mouth hung open, poised for words that wouldn't come. The breath streamed in and out of it roughly.

He had remembered.

The realisation was such a shock, such an icy shock in the pit of my stomach, that I told myself I must be in another world. This couldn't be happening, it really couldn't have happened. He couldn't be levelling his gaze at me like I was the enemy, there couldn't possibly be so much undiluted _hatred _in his eyes. Not after everything I'd worked towards. Not after what had just happened to us.

The doors slammed like the thunder of an enraged god.  
He took a step towards me.

There was no point in trying to convince him that I was innocent. I had kissed him, I had looked into the depths of his soul. He knew that I had been hiding his past from him. He knew that I had kept him away from the voice interface with that picnic on the blanket, that blanket under the stars which was only a minute's walk down the corridor, only a quarter of an hour in the past. How did it seem like the other side of Time and Space now, like something lost forever and forgotten?

I opened my mouth to say something, and shut it again. His footsteps fell like hammer blows on the deck. He was storming swiftly, unstoppably in my direction, neck bent and eyes blazing from under his furrowed brows, fists ready. The violent energy pulsed from him like a force of its own. A force that could murder me in cold blood if it chose. I shrank away, abruptly hyper-aware of the danger I was in. Even more danger, perhaps, than when I had first set foot on this ship.

He had wanted to kill me then.  
He wanted to _torture_ me now.

He was close, so close, and closer – I began to scramble backwards from the helm towards the shelter of the corridor – my muscles were seized up and weak all at once – panic took me – his movement was lithe and hard and deadly like a panther's, his eyes never left his quarry, the vile intent plain in his face – I tried to gulp down air and instead let out an involuntary cry of helpless terror – his hand whipped out – it closed around my wrist and dragged me – my back hit the concave wall beside the steps, my head slamming off it – he gripped my shirt and thrust his fist to my stomach, crushing me against the metal.

I slid sideways. He used both hands to drag me back up by my clothes while I tried to see, tried to think. My head was ringing loudly from the impact and I span with nauseous vertigo.

"When did you know?" he hissed, his breath hot against my face, every word blistering with venom. "_When did you know?_"  
"Tivoli," I rasped as fingers closed like a vice over my throat, "just before you destroyed it."

With the last word my chest had built up too much pressure to withstand. The shock, the grief clawed up my throat and forced its way out of my mouth in a feeble, strained sob. And another, and again. I drew in loud, shallow breaths, trying to keep the hysteria from bubbling over, but the fresh convulsions always came straight back up. His grip on my airways didn't help. There wasn't a hint of mercy to be found in the furnace of his hellish gaze.

_No_, was all I could think. _No, no, no, don't take him away, don't cut me off from you now._

Somehow I had stopped being afraid for my life. I had been afraid for so long that perhaps I was used to it, or else it didn't matter any more. Instead, the simple, dreadful, all-consuming thought that filled my eyes until they overflowed was that I had lost him, irretrievably, that he was never coming back to me, that I was looking at an utter stranger, and that the man I couldn't live without no longer existed.

I loved him, and he was gone.

I tried to say his name through the incoherent sounds that issued from my throat. I tried with limp fingers to touch him, to caress him, to clasp his head and kiss the lips that were set in a hard, unforgiving line. I tried to put my arms around the stone shoulders and coax some life, some response out of the dead body. Not a muscle softened.

Instead his talons shot out and grabbed my arms, crashing them against the wall on either side of me, pinning me.

"DID YOU THINK YOU COULD KEEP THIS FROM ME?!"  
I writhed and shut my eyes against the terrible power of that noise, not noticing my own screams.  
"_LOOK AT ME_." His fingers clenched my jaw and I obeyed, quivering so much that he was almost blurred. "Answer me!"

"You don't understand –"  
"I don't _understand_? WHAT IS THERE TO _UNDERSTAND_?"

He paused, and in the depths, beyond the Soul, I caught the horror of his fresh memories stirring. Disbelief and rage mingled in his expression, inches from mine.

"I fought in the Time War and I _survived_. Nothing needs explaining after that!" His voice alone could have ripped a planet in half. "I locked everybody in. _I killed them all_. I killed my own – I killed them…" Finally he glanced away from me, glanced down in an agony of self-loathing. "I _am _a monster. I'm nothing more than – I fought _them_, and I won by running away – I won by sacrificing everybody else. Everyone I loved. My _family_."

"You had to," I choked, "you had to or they would have won instead. You saved the whole Universe."

His features contracted – there had never been anything so appalling, so destructive, so purely hateful as that face.

"I did it for _you_. I did it because of _your useless planet and your WORTHLESS PEOPLE AND THEIR__**INSIGNIFICANT LIVES**_." He wheezed as though there wasn't enough air in the Cosmos to express his wrath. "I did it because _who else would protect you_? It was _you, you did this_!"

He flung himself away, suddenly, and left me to crumple. He was pacing, tearing out his hair, frenzied.  
"The Daleks couldn't kill me, they could never kill me, because I am _this_," he seethed, eyes darting almost out of their sockets. "I am _this_. I'm an abomination, I'm a monster, I'm everything, _everything _I was afraid of, and _you made me believe I could be_ – _you made me believe I was GOOD… _I was good_… _I'm a_ monster._"

"Doctor, try to think!" I cried, risking his attention regardless of my safety. If there was the smallest fraction of a hope of calming him down, of getting him back… "The War wasn't the only thing that happened to you! There's been so much more – so much _good_ – I wasn't lying, I swear I wasn't lying –"

Too much. He rounded on me again, and _thump_ – went his open palm against my cheek. I was lifted from the ground with the force of it, and opened my eyes to find the world had flipped. Everything was sideways. The bruise blossomed immediately, the adrenaline rush keeping me from screaming out.

"I wasn't lying…"  
A foot connected with my stomach in a sickening thud. Again, again, on every pause between his yells.  
"DO I HAVE – TO FUCKING – BEAT IT – INTO YOU?"

I tasted blood, but didn't take my eyes off him, towering above me, alien and awful.

"You've saved more lives than you know," I hissed through the pain. "You've saved more than you've killed… Doctor..."  
"_SHUT UP. SHUT UP. YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING."  
_"I do. I know you and you're not a monster."  
_"STOP._"

He bent towards me – his hands closed around my arms – I was lifted and hurled once again, hurled as far from him as he could throw me as he tried to deny my words, tried to stamp out the futile hopes I offered. He would never listen to me again. He would never believe himself capable of anything but misery.

I hit the wall hard and went down, stunned by the blow to my forehead.  
His footsteps receded as I cringed in a heap.  
He was at the helm.

"What are you doing?" I tried to focus on his image through the haze that quickly spread across my vision.  
He didn't deign to reply, too full of the frenzy that had gotten into his veins and ripped him apart, body and soul.

I crawled – tilting wildly with every movement – trying to stay focused, stay conscious. "_What are you doing?"  
_"I'M ENDING THIS!" he spat, head whipping about to glare at me as I writhed pathetically. "I'm taking back what's mine."  
"What?"  
"I'm taking back _every life_. Every life I saved with the blood of _my own people_!"

It sank in gradually.  
"No," I wheezed, my chest seizing up as though he'd squeezed the life out of it himself. I tried to stand.  
"_YOU STAY THERE_!" he warned as he tapped co-ordinates into the keyboard. "You're lucky I haven't killed you already."

I flinched.  
"You wouldn't, you can't, Doctor – I've been trying to help you – please, don't – don't hurt my family."  
At this the reality of the situation hit, and I began to cry in earnest.

He was going to kill my mother. He was going to kill her along with everyone else without blinking.

"Killing them won't bring _your_ family back," I tried to say through the rising hysteria.

He fired up the engine and marched about, pressing and pulling, until he was certain that the TARDIS was on course. It made awful sounds and it tipped and bucked, but it was working. I fought back a screech of pure frustration. Why was it letting him do this? Why was it letting this happen?

"I can prove it!" I yelled suddenly, as he began to advance upon me. "I can prove that you're good! I can! Voice interf –"

I never finished the words, because at that moment his fist came crashing down against the side of my head, and the TARDIS seemed to tilt more than ever. My cheek hit the deck with an almighty crunch. I saw stars.

"I wasn't lying," my mouth still said, over and over, as I watched the deck going from transparent to utterly black, and then fading to something that wasn't even black, wasn't even colourless, that was simply nothing.

I slid out of consciousness with a kind of grateful surrender.

* * *

Sorry it took aeons to update! I've been on excursions to other fandoms and got very sidetracked... hope you enjoyed this! The last ever chapter is up soon.


	25. The End

**25**

Mount Weather, Virginia.

He landed his ship, smoking and screeching and fighting him all the way, within the most secret room of that most secret underground city, concealed by tonnes of granite and a five-foot-thick front door. He landed slap bang in the middle of the most jealously guarded location in the world.

A place where one could comfortably survive a nuclear holocaust.

The TARDIS sat at the centre of the official room, where official authority figures panicked. The room where they debated and schemed.  
Where they finally sent signals to their missiles to launch, to track, and to blow the living Hell out of the unfortunate country which had decided to start the fight.

He paced almost sedately to the complex of computers, unchecked, unchallenged.  
Of course, who would think to guard a room that was already surrounded by an impregnable fortress?

His lips curled, and he drew his sonic screwdriver to breeze past the security systems. Even when they noticed, they wouldn't stand a chance.  
Not with their inferior technology.

Five minutes later, he had set a course for every warhead in America that could fly. A few thousand to each nation would do the trick, aimed mostly at cities and towns. He'd let them go in groups, gradually – give the recipients some time to retaliate with missiles of their own, and wipe out this land and all of its inhabitants in turn.

This was the fell swoop. This was the packed punch.  
And then – he would make it his personal business to hunt down every rural village, every forest tribe and every lucky traveller who had happened to survive – and exterminate them through whatever means necessary. He would leave no stone unturned. This world would pay in full.

* * *

I raised my head from a pool of something sticky.  
I touched it, held it close to see.  
Blood. My blood.

"Doctor," I mumbled as the ground tilted away from me and I hauled myself to my feet.  
The air curled with smoke. Sparks flew intermittently from the console. And the door was open.

"Doctor!" I forced my quivering knees to bend and propel me towards his vague silhouette. "What's happening?!"

Like lightning he turned, his velocity making my stomach churn with giddiness.  
At that moment, alarms began to go off. Higher, louder, more insistent even than the cloister bell. Coming from outside the ship.

I saw the room, I saw the computers. My vision began to sharpen with the adrenaline rush, and I made out the complicated diagrams, the lines of indecipherable text on those innumerable screens. With a strangled cry I half-guessed at what he was doing, and made to leap at him, to stop him, with whatever strength I prayed would come to me.

I never got to him. The green of his screwdriver flashed, and the TARDIS doors snapped shut against me.  
"NO!" I launched myself at them, wobbling dangerously as my head pounded with the blood that poured down my temple. "NO!"

She wouldn't open to me, which could only mean one thing.  
She was protecting me from certain death.  
He would murder me outright.

I tried to scream so that he could hear over the alarms, their clamour clogging my own ears hopelessly.  
"_DOCTOR! __**DOCTOR!**_"

No words I could force on him would make a difference anyway. I had been inside his head. I knew the intensity of that tempest, I knew what Skaro meant, and I knew that he was bent on one thing, chased by memories, whipped by guilt and self-loathing, driven on by bloodlust for vengeance.

His vision was veiled. He only saw that part of his past.

There was nothing I could do.  
Nothing _I _could do…  
But –

With a sudden shock of movement I bounded to the console, bellowing with all my might at the TARDIS to switch on the scanner, to turn on any speakers that I hoped to god had been installed.

"VOICE INTERFACE!" I yelled, "I NEED YOU TO MAKE HIM HEAR US!"  
"Voice interface enabled." The hologram fizzed into existence. "Speakers enabled."  
"DOCTOR!" I cried again, aloud, to the room at large, to him.

On the monitor that I pulled around to face me, an image of him working away at the computers blurred into view.

He was striding to and fro, pointing the screwdriver at one screen and another, and another. Furiously his arm swung and snapped in the air. He barely flinched at my voice echoing over the sirens. Didn't even turn his head. For one heart-stopping moment I was absolutely certain that this wasn't going to work.

"Doctor, I forgive you," I said.

He paused, shoulders stiffening and raised as though to fend off a physical attack.  
I wanted to throw my arms around those shoulders. I would have held him even as he strangled me to death.

"It wasn't your fault and you didn't deserve this. You're not what you think you are." I stumbled, trying to find the words. "There's been so much more than the War and you need to see it. You can't go on without knowing. I have it all, here, I can show you everything. The TARDIS can tell you. The TARDIS has records of everything that's ever happened to you. Don't you want to know why you risked so much to save us? Why Earth was so important?"

He jerked violently and I knew I had hit the wrong nerve.  
His arm shot back up. The computers whirred in a frenzy of action as he bombarded through their security.  
I had lost him.

"NO! Voice interface, tell him! Tell him that he loved us! Tell him why!"

The hologram gazed back at me with a look of such despair and loss that the tears sprang from my eyes and mingled with the blood dripping from my chin.  
She couldn't give an answer so complex, so infinite, as it needed to be. She knew he wouldn't listen, wouldn't understand.

"_Launch in, sixty, seconds,_" barked out a cool female voice. The missiles.

"TELL HIM!" I screeched, banging my fists off the panels in a desperate fury, throat ripping with the sound, chest heaving with sobs that came from nowhere.

_The end of the world the end of the world the end of the world, and I've failed them, I couldn't do it, I couldn't do what he always did._

"I can't," his translucent image replied.

Grief surged over me, submerged me, and at the same time an all-consuming fury that I had never dreamed of.  
I was angry. I was angry for them. For the people who didn't want to die.

"NAME THEM." the words tore gutturally from me. "_NAME THOSE PEOPLE HE LOVED. NAME THE LAST FIVE PEOPLE WHO TRAVELLED WITH HIM, GO ON_!"

On the monitor's image, he had turned around to look at us. He was stock still. I couldn't make out his face.  
Was it the blood or the salt water that was flooding so heavily down to my neck?

Through vision that was beginning to glaze over again, I looked to the hologram.  
It was smiling at me. It was beaming. An ethereal light seemed to uplift its features until it was blinding and angelic.

"Amy Pond," it said in triumphant tones. "Rory Williams. River Song. Rose Tyler. Donna Noble."

I felt the bottom of my stomach disappear and my insides fall away into nothingness.  
My hands clenched around the monitor were clammy.  
There was a moment when I felt that the entire Universe had stopped to look at me.

"Donna Noble?" I choked. "Donna Noble?"  
The Doctor stood in speechless thought on the screen, filled with his own revelations.

But it barely mattered. It barely mattered at all. Because the most incredible sensation had taken over my body.

"Donna Noble?" I repeated once more. "Mom?"

He heard. Over the alarms he heard that word, and took a step back.

"_Launch in, thirty, seconds._"

His hand trembled before lifting the sonic screwdriver to the computers once more.  
Shaking myself out of what must be – _must be _a dream – I darted to the TARDIS doors, and they unlocked at my will.

He glanced back at me, once, daring to break his concentration.  
His cheeks were dashed with tears.

There was an awful grinding noise, a high-pitched squeal riddled with technology. The workstation was straining under some immense pressure. The screwdriver buzzed and zipped. His wrist vibrated with the effort.

"Your mother," he called over his shoulder in a broken voice, "was Donna."  
"She was – she was one of your friends?!"  
"I remember her now."

Another crunching whine from the machines.

"What are you doing?" I screamed.  
"Preventing the worst mistake of my whole life. I'm reversing it."

I gaped like an idiot, while the blood soaked down to the bottom of my shirt. Then, sure enough –

"_Launch terminating_. _Launch terminating. Warning. Warning. System, failure._"  
"WHAT'S HAPPENING?"  
"It's trying to stop twenty thousand missiles at once!"

"Twenty thousand? The US only has _five_ thousand!"  
"Not in nineteen eighty-nine they don't! Apparently I was feeling extravagant. The whole thing's in overdrive, anyway!"

Simultaneously the fact rang out. "_Launch terminating._ _All systems, in overdrive. Warning. System, failure._"

"WILL IT MANAGE TO STOP THEM?"  
"I can support it! But there's going to be some fireworks!" he called back.

His voice was so odd. He sounded almost jubilant, ecstatic, thrilled. He sounded like the Doctor.

It hit me, in that moment, that he didn't mean _tame_ fireworks.  
He meant that the whole place was going to go up. The muscles in his arm, taut and trembling, told me as much.

"Can you get out in time?" I yelled.  
One more glance in my direction, and a small, sorry smile.  
"I'm afraid not."

Gravity made strange shapes and I found myself falling against the doorframe. Nothing would stay still.  
I looked down at my clothes which were red, all red, and felt a sigh leaving me.

* * *

He almost broke his position to rush to her – almost broke his concentration – but managed to steady himself in time.  
She was still standing. That was the important thing. And she was strong. Didn't he know it.

Her eyes fluttered open again and she pulled herself upright through sheer force of will. _That's my girl._

It was all so clear now. The rage, the fire, had been extinguished at just the drop of a hat – at the drop of five names.  
Everything he had ever worked for, everyone he'd ever cherished. He could name them all.  
And Donna, incandescent amongst their faces, smiling on him with a warmth he thought he'd never feel again.

"There's something you have to know about Donna!" he shouted over the spluttering alarm bells.  
"What is it?"  
"_She explains everything about you_. Sarah," he laughed out of pure disbelief, "your mother was_ a Time Lord_."

He could see the sparks beginning to burn at the edges of screens. The wave was coming fast.

"YOU NEED TO GET OUT OF HERE!" he bellowed suddenly, making her jump.  
"I AM _NOT_ LEAVING YOU!"  
"YOU HAVE TO. YOU'LL DIE."

"SO WILL YOU, IN AN EXPLOSION!"  
"_ONLY MAYBE_!"

He couldn't help but twist around, just one last time, to take her in. To grin impishly at her.  
To let her know that everything would be fine, whether he survived or not.

Her image, framed by the blue of the ship, stood out like a splash of vivid scarlet against the bleak backdrop of the room.  
He felt a jolt of terror as he finally noticed just how much blood – and he had done that, _he _had caused that, and – it was a horrifying amount of blood.

Would she make it?

"GO!" he roared, "GO! Find a hospital! She'll take care of you!"

"_I love you_," came the last reply, so faint he almost didn't hear.

The TARDIS doors slammed shut, and then the whirring, grinding noise carried her away from him.  
_She left the brakes on too._

The explosion was sparking up like a breath inhaled before a sigh. Before the storm. Before the blast.

"_Launch terminating,_" spat the computers. "_Launch terminating._"  
"Please," he closed his eyes and prayed. "Please."

"_Launch… terminated."_

Success rippled through him with the wave of searing heat that burst from the complex. He felt the ground beneath him shifting and then disappearing entirely as he was lifted off his feet by the explosion.

Fire and shrapnel enveloped him.

He didn't open his eyes.

* * *

I held the bunched up cloth to my forehead and worked furiously at the keyboard, gulping down air, barely keeping my head above the surface of consciousness. The ship's heart writhed against my commands, squealing and scraping loudly.

"_No_," I growled furiously as I wrenched the space-time throttle. "_We are waiting for him_."

Finally, it consented to land on the mountainside thirty seconds after the explosion, standing precariously out on a flat ledge.

I didn't even bother to check the external scanner as the noises came to a halt.

"DOCTOR!" I flung the doors wide, still clutching the quickly darkening material to my head as I scrambled on three limbs across the rocks, fighting nausea, fighting unconsciousness. "DOCTOR!"

It wasn't hard to miss. The caving hole in the slopes betrayed the spot where the room was, where the explosion had broken through the granite, fragments still crumbling into the gap. I stumbled along, gasping out his name at every other breath, my heart throwing itself against my ribs with a speed that crippled my limbs and blurred my vision.

Finally I stood at the mouth of that small recess, waiting for him to emerge, to speak, to stem the tears that hurled themselves down my face and the panic that clawed its way up my throat.

I waited.

His name echoed down into the blackness of the hole.

I waited.

My own voice echoed back to me, but not his.

I waited.

An eternity slipped by as I slowly realised that he wasn't coming back.

I didn't dare to lower myself through the gap.  
If I fell I wouldn't get up again. If I saw him… I wouldn't get up again.

The thought alone was beginning to drive me to a frenzy, gnawing away at my stomach as I stood there and refused to believe he was gone. I looked down, and realised that the blood on my hand wasn't from my head. It was from where I had bitten into the skin, from the crescent-shaped puncture wounds. It welled up and dripped from my fingertips.

I stared at it, because if I didn't concentrate on all that red life that was draining out of me, if I didn't keep my focus entirely on those crimson beads, I would tumble into the endless abyss and never emerge again. The abyss at my feet, both physical and otherwise. There was nothing, nothing in the Universe, but myself and this last image that I clung to.

My eyes, unmoving, stung with concentration.

I didn't quite feel the rock against my knees, or the sensation of my body slipping some way down the mountainside. My mind was light and adrift, and after a while somewhat beautiful. The sun glowed over the scene as though it was any other day, in any other place. The thin atmosphere tugged at my lungs and made them wheeze.

It really was a Heaven, all the way up here.

As the last of my consciousness ebbed from me I forgot him. I forgot everything except the sky, and soon enough even that was fading.

In the final moments of uncomprehending wakefulness, strange and wonderful shapes began to wind lazily across my eyes against that azure blue… a golden, gorgeous luminosity, like the marks burnt into your vision after the waving of a sparkler on bonfire night.

_The angels are here_, I thought with a last surge of pure joy. _The angels have come for me._

* * *

The light was all around him, blazing from his blackened skin and purifying everything. His exposed flesh began to knit back together, his bones resetting, his arms regrowing. He flexed his new fingers, and could feel his face reassembling itself.

He staggered through that hole, out into the cool air of the day, out onto the mountainside.

There she was, crumpled on the rocks just metres below.

Unmoving.

"_No_," he threw himself down after her, emitting a choked snarl, "_no, no, __**no**__! SARAH!"_

A faint smile stood out against the gore smeared across her cheek and matted in her hair.

He grabbed at her with golden-glowing hands, hauling her into his fiery arms as the cries came from him uninhibited.  
Donna's daughter. Donna's daughter. Dying in his arms. After everything she'd done.

The most important woman in the Universe. Just like her mother.  
_Just like her mother._

His jaw slackened, lower lip trembling uncontrollably, as he clasped her body to his radiant chest and watched his light flowing over her.

"I love you," he said.

Then he tilted her blank expression up to his own, cradling her heavy head in his hand – hadn't she once held him this way? – and with a small intake of breath, sealed his mouth over those faintly smiling lips.

A struggle – a jolt – and then it seemed to rush out of him and into her limp and frail form.

He opened his eyes to see the golden rays pouring into her, illuminating her from within. She was unearthly, and beautiful, the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. He wanted to flood all of his life into her, every last ounce. The urge was so strong, to give himself over to her utterly.

But he reigned himself in, and forced himself to measure, to count out the precious regenerations that he gifted her with.

Sarah Noble. The daughter of a Time Lord.  
Saved and made whole by his power.

It was time.

He broke away, his eyes grazing over her figure, lit up with his vital energy, ready to detonate, to carry her with the force of a tidal wave into her new regeneration. _Their _new regeneration.

He smiled, and held her close against him. He had done this once before – transmitting his energy into another entity. Last time it had produced a duplicate Doctor and caused Donna to transform. This time it was just the two of them, he and his companion, and both would keep their faces, their identities. Nothing would change.

Well. Almost nothing.

Instinctively he reached up to touch the back of his own head, where the Soul was being dissolved inside him.  
Gone. Gone forever.

He was himself again.

The inevitable blast of light and colours danced around them as their bodies expelled the excess energy.

Her wounds were gone. The blood was gone. She looked fresh and incandescent as the first day of summer.

And at that moment, her eyes opened.

He didn't bend to kiss her again, knowing that the process might be interrupted – but he pressed his palm to her cheek, fingers curling through her hair, and let his tears soak into her shirt wordlessly.

She murmured his name just once, before unable to bear it any longer, he pulled her up and threw his arms around her, his face buried in her collar.

Her loose grip increased as the sobs erupted from her chest, her hands finding his back, his neck, his hair, his arms, not knowing where to settle. Finally she clasped his head between her palms and drew him back to look into his eyes.

"It's you," she said blankly. "It's you. Doctor. You're healed. It's gone."  
"Yes. It's gone."

He admitted it, admitted to the centuries of memories that had settled once again upon his shoulders, a million burdens to bear, a universe of unspeakable sorrows wedged in his heart. But it was alright.

As long as she held him, all of that was alright.

She drew him close and kissed his forehead tenderly, pressed her own against it, her eyes closing softly over.  
Utterly safe, utterly trusting, in his care, in his keeping. The man who not ten minutes ago could have killed her in cold blood.

All over now.

They stood for what felt like a moment and an eternity.  
He could almost feel the thoughts coursing through her, and knew that they were like his thoughts.  
Time, space, she saw them all as he did. She saw the cosmos with a Time Lord's eyes. She saw him as he ought to be seen.

"People will be arriving," she whispered at last. "We ought to get the TARDIS away."  
"Yes."

A pause.

"The first thing I need is a really long hot bath."  
He laughed aloud. "I think that's a realistic goal, as long as her circuits haven't blown."  
"I hope not."

For a minute they simply couldn't let go. They clung to one another like survivors out at sea, rocked by violent tides.  
Then, finally, her hand found his and she squeezed comfortingly.

He opened the door for her,  
they stepped inside,  
and just like that,

two Time Lords were off to see the Universe.

**The End.**

(But if pushed I may write you an epilogue in which Sarah takes her new boyfriend to meet her mother... imagine the possibilities.)


	26. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

"It's been a day since you disappeared."  
"Okay."  
"She'll be off her head with worry, about the incident at your campus."

He ducked his head for a moment and I sensed the pain and mortification flooding through him as strongly as if it was my own. His emotions were imprinted into my body every moment now; I didn't need to kiss him to be able to see into his hearts.

"Your phone probably has a thousand missed calls."

I sucked in a breath. "What do I tell her?"  
"You have to be careful. You know she doesn't remember me, and she never should. She'd burn up in an instant."  
"So how do I explain the – the killings?"

He winced again. I squeezed his hand as we stepped out of the TARDIS, whose cloaking device was enabled just in case. There were no survivors of the attack at university. He had terminated every witness, every officer on site. Just after landing here he had ordered the ship to pinpoint all of the mobile phones collected as evidence, and systematically delete video and photographic footage of the event. Its next job was to mess with all satellite cameras which could have caught their image.

Nobody would ever connect his face to the horrors of that day. Hopefully, nobody would recognise our police box.  
The thought cut him deeply. Justice hadn't been done, and those people had died for nothing.

"Remember where we parked her," I chided him gently, trying to lift his spirits.  
"Mmm." He walked on, dragging me a little with his increased stride.  
"Look – stop."

I tugged at him until he turned to face me, and threaded my arms around his neck, clasping him tight. I didn't have to say anything, but planted a warm kiss on his forehead and stroked a hand through his glossy mane. He was so much the same, and yet so different. The hologram had come to life and filled the space of my old monster. The darkness had subsided, the confusion and rage had given way to the tragic weight of responsibility. I loved him as much as I ever had, but I missed him, in some ways. I missed his – his – vitality, his dangerous energy, his absoluteness.

You never forget your first Doctor.

We had spent a week after Mount Weather just travelling. We stayed in solitary places filled with wondrous beauty. We marvelled at the Universe. He marvelled at how he could ever have wanted to destroy it. We discussed everything, every miniscule moment of his life since waking up in that laboratory, and every moment of mine since first seeing that blue box appear, on my way through campus with Kat.

We had visited Kat's grave, a few weeks into the future. I had said goodbye, and he let me cry against his jumper.  
I wanted to be angry with him, to spite him, but he wasn't that person anymore and it wasn't fair.  
So I had forgiven him, without saying so, in the quietest part of myself.

"Do you have to go? Can't you stay?" I murmured against his temple now as I kissed it again, lingering, comforting.  
"I'll be fine."

He was going to drop me off at the front door with my "uni luggage", and then go straight back to the ship. From there he'd jump a week into the future and arrive back on the doorstep on Sunday morning, ready for a roast dinner. To him it would only take five minutes. But I would have to go an entire seven days without him.

"Promise you'll come straight here. Don't travel alone."  
"I won't. Believe me, I won't."

We both knew that he couldn't stand to be alone for more than an hour straight at the moment. It made me glad, after all this, that I had been the one to get stuck in the TARDIS and become his prey. Because he wasn't alone and never had to be. Nobody knew how to be there for him like I did. The second-last Time Lord. His friend's daughter. His equal. I wouldn't have trusted anybody else in the Universe to console him at a time like this, or any other time, for the rest of forever.

He didn't come within sight of the house. We said goodbye, and he trudged away, looking as if he had the whole Cosmos upon his shoulders. In many ways, he did.

I couldn't hold it in any more. As soon as his back was turned I began to run headlong towards home, both of my hearts thudding with excitement more than exertion. The one thing he had changed about me. No wonder he was always running. How _good _it felt to run.

The front door was flung aside so violently that its glass panes almost smashed, seconds after I knocked.  
She was there, her mouth in a perfect 'O' of surprise and indignation and relief and panic.  
She shrieked my name so loudly that I became temporarily deaf.

The next thing I knew my bags were dropping from my hands as she engulfed me entirely in her arms. Then she hit me hard on the shoulder, shouting something that I couldn't hear because I was deaf. Finally she surrounded me again, sobbing as if her heart would shatter into a hundred shards of parental love and distress.

I was sat down at the kitchen table, given a cup of the sweetest tea I'd ever drunk, and demanded to give her some answers.

Eventually it was established that I hadn't been on campus at all during the attack, but in bed at my uni house. I'd simply dropped my phone in the sink the day before and broken it. I didn't know any more than anybody else about what had happened. All I knew was that hundreds of people had been murdered.

I shook my head with growing agitation as she asked if all of my friends were okay.  
"Kat," I choked, and from then on I couldn't say another word.

That night in Mum's bed, I cried until my muscles ached and my head throbbed with the violence of it. She cuddled me and caressed my forehead like a child. The Doctor had done the same, but he had his own sufferings which I had to soften in turn. Tonight it was only my anguish, and my mother's comfort. Tonight I let something go that I had been needing to purge, the last dregs of sorrow before I could move on.

It wasn't as easy as all that for him – which was why I had to exorcise every demon, every regret, so that I could be this strong for his sake in the future.

For the last time, I fell asleep with the strain of raw grief in my chest.

* * *

"Come in, then, John! Take your shoes off."  
Mum bustled through to the kitchen seconds after this greeting, her voice pitched a little higher than usual. I caught his eye and couldn't resist a smirk. If only she knew that she was ordering about her old friend, saviour of the Universe, a one-thousand-two-hundred year-old Lord of Time. At least, he _thought_ it was around one-thousand-two-hundred.

I had broken the 'boyfriend' news to her two days ago, once things had settled down.  
"John Smith!" she'd chirped back at me. "Sounds about as boring as you can get. Is he boring?"  
"No Mum, he's wonderful."  
"Well, we'll see. I suppose he'll want feeding, will he?"  
"I suppose so, yes."  
"Does he like sprouts?"  
"Um. I don't know. We haven't been together all that long."

Now he stepped inside, looking only about twenty-three in yet another chunky knitted cardigan, a band t-shirt and plum skinny jeans, and – worst of all – TOMS footwear.

"I've already told you how stupid they look," I grimaced at him.  
"I love TOMS. TOMS are cool. You of all people should know what's cool and what's not."  
"Well, in a few weeks you'll agree with me."

Funnily enough, in a couple of weeks he really did hate his TOMS – though for a completely different reason. No, in the end he began to detest them halfway through an adventure which involved three dragon eggs and a landscape made entirely of the slipperiest ice imaginable. You can imagine how those prematurely hatched fire-coughing lizards felt after being wildly dropped in the middle of a frantic chase. Let's just say his TOMS weren't fit for use afterwards. But we won't go into that.

Mum was out of sight, so I closed the space between myself and the Doctor for an instant, enveloping him silently in my arms. He heaved a sigh, though he'd only been missing me a fraction of the time that I'd been waiting for him. Nuzzling into my neck, his mouth traced a line up to my mouth and caught it gently. We retreated into our otherworldly space. His thoughts and memories swam and curled sedately about me – the trip here, wondering what to wear to impress Mum, his irrational excitement and relief to occupy the same space and breathe the same air as me again.

"Excuse me! We'll be having none of that! I want to keep my appetite for dinner, thank you."  
Mum huffed herself out of view again, and we grinned sheepishly before setting about finding something ordinary to do.

Finally, we settled for Lord of the Rings Risk.  
"Is there a Middle Earth out there?" I asked idly as we tossed dice and took one another's battalions.  
"I've never looked," he beamed. "We'll certainly try."  
Then Mum hollered, "DINNER!"

It turned out that he didn't like sprouts. Mum wasn't impressed, but only pursed her lips a little to show it.

"So, John Smith. What exactly do you do?"  
"Oh, I'm doing a PhD in Physics."  
"Really." She tried to find something about this that she didn't like, and failed. "Promising career ahead, then?"  
"Looks like it, yes. My current paper is on Propagation in Smooth Random Potentials."

"Proper what?"  
"It's a study of micron-scale quantum-mechanical systems in the context of electron conductance through two-dimensional electron gasses."

She sat there, fuming at him silently. I realised that she thought he was laughing at her. My mother, the ex-temp.  
Once upon a time she was the most important woman in the universe, and she would never know.  
I glanced at the Doctor, and saw that he felt the blow too. He shifted uncomfortably.  
He wanted his old Donna back so badly. He wanted to be open with her.

"Sarah told me you're going back to work soon."  
"Yes," she said somewhat warily, "well, I need something to do now she's gone," she thrust a thumb at me, "and Shaun."  
"I'm sorry that didn't work out."

He said it with such sad sincerity that for a moment she looked taken aback.  
"We had our twenty-three years. I couldn't have lived with anybody forever. Sarah will tell you."  
Again he winced as though she had pricked him. I clasped his hand under the table and heard the echo throughout his body.

_I was going to be with you… forever.  
I know._

"You mustn't hold back, at work," he said on impulse. "I mean, from what Sarah says you're more intelligent than you let on. On your way up you're bound to find somebody new."

She studied him from over her glasses, suspicious and yet drawn to this young man, his apparent familiarity with a woman twice his age whom he'd only just met. She teetered for a moment. And then… she smiled.

"That's kind. We don't get gentlemen like you nowadays. Not that they were around when I was young, either."

I looked from her to him, and abruptly realised how aged she must be compared to his memories. The streaks of grey and wrinkles around her eyes were commonplace to me. The thirty-something Donna he had whisked away only existed in old photo albums, gathering dust at the back of our attic.

"I don't know _what _you see in him physically," she whispered animatedly to me in the kitchen, as we plated up the apple crumble. "He's just a long streak of nothing! What's there to hold onto?"  
"Oh, Mum."

"I mean, you could have found someone more _masculine_ and less Steven-wannabe-Hawking. He's got no muscles as it is, I wouldn't be surprised if they _did _start deteriorating. You watch out for that."  
"He can't help it."

"Well, if he gets smart with me again he'll have a bruise the size of Asia on that gigantic brain. Let him try and talk quantum-physics then."  
"Be nice!"

She span to fix me with a small smirk, and I could see her own brain working.

"There is _something _about him though – you get a kind of vibe – you know, like he's something _special_. Like he really cares."  
"He does really care, Mum. He has a big heart."  
"Does he have a big anything else?" she winked conspiringly.  
"_Mother_!"

"And he's going to be a _Doctor of Philosophy_! I used to have a secret thing for academic men, you know –"  
"Mum –"  
"– ever since I clapped eyes on _Mister Titcome_ back in college."  
"Mum!"  
"Yes, I know, you're thinking 'what an unfortunate name' but _believe me_, it worked in his favour."  
"Let's go, Mum."

The fact that the Doctor absolutely loved crumble – despite having an intense loathing for uncooked apples – so much so that he asked for seconds and thirds, made up entirely for his dislike of sprouts in Mum's eyes.

"As long as you like _something _that's healthy," she said in the practised voice of a tolerant mother.

"Have you talked to Donna about university?" he asked as casually as he could around ten minutes later.  
"No, not really."  
"Apparently classes start again tomorrow," she snapped. "I'd give it more than a month if you asked me."  
"Second semester is over in three weeks, Mum. Nobody would be able to take their exams."  
"But he's still out there!" she barked. "It's not like one of them suicide cases. He could come back."

The Doctor was really holding up well under the circumstances.

"What do you think is best for Sarah?" he asked.  
She looked incredibly impressed that he prioritised her opinion. "Change universities, as a start."  
"Mum, the courses are different for every uni. I can't switch right now."  
"Then drop out and start again next year."  
"A whole three more years?"  
"We've got the funds, darling, you know that."

I did know, and I suddenly clocked that Mum winning the lottery just after marrying Dad couldn't have been a coincidence.  
Not with the Doctor in the picture.  
Strange, to think that I actually owed all the comforts of my life to him. I glanced at him to share the notion, and he shrugged.

"Mum," I began. "John would quite like to go travelling when he gets his PhD. I really want to go with him."  
'John' was immediately fixed with such a scrutinising, untrusting look that I was surprised he didn't sink under the table.  
"I've been once before, around America," he said without flinching. "I've got the funds, too. No need to worry about that."

"Oh?" she said with a glance at me that could only mean, _you could be marrying into real money_!  
Of course that would be what she wanted. She had always treated her wealth carefully and appreciated a man who added to it.

"Please, Mummy!" I cried with a sudden grin. "John will keep me safe, and we'll stick to all the loveliest places."  
"Well. We'll talk about it again later, but I don't see why not, for a while. Before you start studying again."  
"Of course."

* * *

Night fell fast, and we hardly noticed. Mum had settled her opinion on John Smith, and the result was double thumbs up. She was finally done telling him about that time her friend Marie had managed to catch her skirt in a lift in the presence of both her ex-husband and brand new fiancé. He was deciding that he really didn't like coffee, but that was alright, because neither did I, and I was busy stirring a teabag around his fresh mug.

"And _then_," she hooted, "she's so flustered she hasn't a clue what to say, and next thing she knows the word 'threesome' is out of her mouth – as a joke, you know – and her ex and her bloke are looking at each other with this look on their faces and she realises – she realises she's made the biggest mistake of her _life_!"  
"So what did she do?" he guffawed along.  
"Well, she claims that nothing happened, but I swear to this day she did it. She'll never look you in the eye if you mention it."

Finally, he put down his finished tea and declared he must be off. "Got to catch the last train home, I'm afraid."  
"Oh, I wish you'd brought a suitcase! You could have stayed a week."  
"Yes, well – as you said classes start again tomorrow."

She let us alone at the front door – a complete alteration to her attitude when he'd first stepped through it.

I glanced up at him mournfully.  
"When will you come back?"  
"Come away with me next weekend."  
"But why do I have to wait so long?"

His eyes grew softer as he fixed me with them for a few seconds.

"I want you to have your time with Donna," he muttered, "before we really set off. When you get out there – it's difficult to remember why you'd ever want to go home. Your mother won't last forever. You're going to outlive her, Sarah."  
"I was always going to do that."  
"Yes, but when she's eighty you're going to look the same. Unless her eyesight becomes abysmal she's going to notice."

It struck me.  
"And I won't be able to see her again."  
"You've only got so much time. You don't understand now, but you will. You need to make the most of it."

I nodded solemnly.  
"But it doesn't mean you have to stay away. She loves you. You can come back whenever, while I'm living here. We'll be like family."

He leaned down to press his mouth over mine, and I felt the rush of wild emotion swirling within him. _Family_.  
How long it had been since he had been part of a real family.

"I'd like that," he looked at the floor and the corners of his lips turned upwards.  
"So come back Wednesday night."  
"You won't get tired of me, if I'm always around? Donna won't get tired of me?"  
"She spent all of her time with you, once. I think she can manage it again," I smirked. "But how could you ask me that?"

"You never know. I'm not very good at the whole static family life."  
"Who says we always have to be static?" I pulled at his jumper. "You have a time machine. I have a window that's _very_ easy to sneak out of, across the roof and down the drainpipe."

His whole expression lit up for a moment in mischievous, suggestive, undiluted glee.  
"Yes," he purred. "That sounds about right." Then, "I'll see you soon Donna!"  
"Lovely to have you! Come back soon!"  
"I certainly will!"

And with that, he was off – most likely to change his clothes, pack an overnight bag, and hop straight to Wednesday afternoon.  
I turned back into the warmth and light of our well-furnished house, made warmer and lighter by Mum's ecstatic mood.

I was in for the biggest girly chat of my entire young life, and I had a _lot_ of editing to do, in the thrilling story of how John Smith and I first got to know one another…


End file.
